[CentOS] Resizing a fat filesystem on a USB partition

Tue Jan 29 23:19:27 UTC 2008
MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com>

On Jan 29, 2008 2:53 PM, Dogsbody <dan at dogsbody.org> wrote:
>
> > AFAIK, there is no way to "resize" any FAT partition.  You have to
> > delete both partitions and then create a new one.
>
> I thought the CD installer came with a utility to resize FAT partitions (albeit
> in MS DOS)?  And this isn't possible in CentOS it self?  :-/
>
AFAIK = As far as I know.

I could be wrong.

But, that said, the way a FAT partition is laid out, the FAT itself is
a fixed sized entity.  In order to resize it, one would have to change
the cluster size (requiring a reformat) or change the FAT size,
requiring some amount of relocation of clusters.  The most likely
implementation would be to save the existing files, re-allocate the
FAT, then restore the files.  Even under MS-DOS.

In any case, if the partition you want to resize is after the one you
want to expunge, that cannot be done without a save-reallocate-restore
algorithm because the FAT is at the front end of the file system.

Linux/UNIX file systems are not allocated that way and are slightly
more flexible, but with an LVM YMMV.

> Ho hum, thank you very much for the quick answer :-)
>

You're welcome, and I hope I was right!  That's what I did with mine.

mhr