Last update :11/22/2006

General documentation
The livecd-howto
How to resize partition, step by step

HOW TO  "MOVE / COPY"  PARTITION
In this documentation we will copy a NTFS partition from a drive to another one ; to move a partition, follow the same instructions, but choose Move : you can only move on the same device ! Moving to another device is copying.
(Screenshots have been made with QEMU)
Please, first have a look at "introduction", from the General documentation

Running GParted from a Linux system is the same as running it from the livecd, BUT  the livecd doesn't mount any drive ! If you run GParted from a running system, you can't work on THIS system.

a) Booting off the livecd, GParted shows the harddrive contains a NTFS partition we want to copy (/dev/hda). We want to copy the ntfs partition to the second harddrive : /dev/hdb.
gparted shows the hard drives

b) Right click on the selected partition to copy to make it active, and click on copy in the menu. copying the selected partition to the clipboard

c) Using the drow-down box, choose the second hard drive, where the partition is going to be pasted.switching to the second hard drive

d) If the second drive is new, you will need to Set Disklabel to enable the past action. Overwise you will have a error message. Click in the unallocated space to make it active and then click on Drive and Set disklabel.
Setting disklabel
e) AFTER YOU HAVE READ the warning message, and you are sure that the drive is empty, click on create !warning message before setting disklabel
f) Then, active the partition by clicking it and click again, on Past in the menu.pasting to the second hard drive

g) In the new window, click Past again. running the past operation
 h) And Apply changesapplying past
i) And one more time, the last one !last warning before pasting !
j) It goes on...applying pending past
k) And suddenly... all operations are succesfully completed !partition NTFS is pasted

ATTENTION PLEASE !  DON'T REBOOT RIGHT NOW !!! If you do this, it will be a big crash! Actually you have the same windows XP on both hard drive. From the second hard drive, XP cant boot, because there is no MBR for the moment ! But if you try to reboot, the first hard drive will run XP and seeing the second XP on the second hard drive, it will be  a kind of disaster ! Windows cant bear windows ! So, just turn off the PC, unplug both hard drives, and plug the new one as master, leaving the other one for the moment. Of course, if you use a bootloader like grub, you can configure it to hide/unhide one of the XP you want to  (Booting Dos-Windows with grub)