Requesting suggestions for speedy partitioning software

[Rhonda the Sly]

About two months ago I assembled a new computer, slapped Windows Vista on it and have been happy ever since. Of course, while I did put Vista on the computer, I reserved about 100GB of space for either Ubuntu 7.10 or 8.04b5. After a month or so I realized Ubuntu wasn't going to see the light of day on my new drive so I formatted the last 100GB of my drive to NTFS and it magically transformed into my data partition. Something I felt I needed anyway, as I forgot to do it before the Vista installation. Well, fast forward a month or so to the present and over a cup of coffee I think to myself "that's a sloppy, retarded-as-hell partitioning job!" 400GB for the OS and 100GB for storage?

Hell, I'd put an end to that. I do all my partitioning work on the Gnome Partition Editor, it works for me most of the time... only, I'm finding to be rather slow now. It works like a snail moving uphill wearing sandals that are too big for its feet which it shouldn't even have because it's a snail. It's taken up 26hrs so far and is set to take another 20.5hrs just to shrink one of my partitions from 372GB to 229GB. I don't intend to disturb it during this time but I do plan to cancel growing my second partition. So, for future partitioning fun, I need to find a partition editor that will work at a better pace, any suggestions?

Edit: For your viewing pleasure I cut the wall-o-text in half to make it look like the post has a decent format. I know, I know. I love you too.

 

[QuixoticOne]

I haven't seen anything much faster than gparted/system rescue cd.

Actually just SHRINKING a partition can be pretty fast assuming you have it defragged first and a lot of the free space is 'on the end' and that free space is bigger than or close to the size of the amount you want to shrink it by.

However if stuff is fragmented all over the partition with little pockets of empty space strewn all over and you want to shrink the partition, well, there is no avoiding having to read most all of the data and write it in a very different location physically. Basically a full defrag + partition shrink, and it's going to be kinda slow.

The diskpart utility built into Vista can somewhat quickly SHRINK a non-OS partition given that it has enough free space to do the shrinking.
It can't shrink the booted OS partition, though. And it can't MOVE a partition or GROW one "downwards" AFAIK. So it is mostly useless.

If you really want something faster for BIG changes, buy another disc drive, get something (maybe like clonezilla?), run an image from the drive you're using onto the spare drive, reformat / repartition the main drive the way you want it, and then restore the files from the image back to the master drive's partitions.... I'm not sure what utilities will let you restore imaged files to different partition layouts than they came from but I'm pretty sure either clonezilla or the acronis tool might be solutions if you check them out.
In any case it's going to go at a maximum speed of around 50MB of used data per second, so at least 45-60 minutes / 100GB of in use data is unavoidable even with reasonably quick drives.

 

[Rhonda the Sly]

I'm way too cheap to buy a new drive. Anyways, the shrinking finished about 15hrs early but it still took over a day to do, which is insane. I defrag the thing all the time. Heck, even sometimes for fun. I guess I'll stick to GParted though and see how the growing goes, thanks QuixoticOne.