# How change disk sizes when using dual boot [Solved]

## m_gustafsson

I have a laptop on which I can dual boot Windows and Gentoo. 

The laptop has a disk with 80GB and when I set up the dual boot I split the disk in two halfes, each 40GB.

I use the Windows boot loader on the Master Boot Record, if I remember correctly, and GRUB.

Now, when I in principle only uses Gentoo I would like to increase the disk size for the Gentoo part.

Is this possible to do in a fairly safe way?Last edited by m_gustafsson on Mon May 04, 2009 5:00 am; edited 1 time in total

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## EzInKy

You might consider using gparted, but if you are planning on completely wiping out windows then you could just reformat its partition and turn it into something more useful such as /media.

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## m_gustafsson

Thanks!

I will study gparted documentation.

Unfortunately I cannot remove Windows, that would have been the best solution, but I need two Windows applications  :Sad: 

/M

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## alatar

Have you tried Wine or, possibly, VirtualBox?  :Smile: 

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## m_gustafsson

I have tried wine, but one of the applications is some kind of a "one-click installation" windows program, and I never managed to get it running in wine.

The other application I need to run in Winows is Labview, which I read does not work under wine.

Maybe I will give it a try later again  :Smile: 

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## Havin_it

GParted is definitely the tool for the job. I've used it a few times for resizing partitions on a dual-boot, and it's the only one I could find (at the time anyway) that'll happily resize both the NTFS and Ext3 partitions.  You of course can't resize while you're booted from the hard disk, so they do a LiveCD (or LiveUSB) distro that you can use. I found this so useful that I copied the liveUSB version into my HDD's /boot partition (It's only about 50MB) and use it when I want to do operations on the HDD. Because it's all loaded into RAM you can even use it to operate on the disk you've booted from.

So, um, yeah... it's pretty good =)

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## m_gustafsson

I used gparted to do the modifications of my disk during the weekend, and it worked very well.

I only had to rebuild my grub.mbr used by the Windows boot loader to get Gentoo to boot again.

See this thread in the gparted forum: http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=13415

Many thanks for your help   :Very Happy: 

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