Re: Problems resizing NTFS partition

Here's the result of ntfsclone:
ntfsclone -m -o ntfsmeta.img /dev/hda1
(putting bzip ntfsmeta.img at the end makes it echo the help text -
apparently the syntax is wrong)

The two commands must be typed separately, in separate lines.

Current volume size: 123510771712 bytes (123511 MB)
Current device size: 123510772224 bytes (123511 MB)
ERROR(27): ftruncate failed for file 'ntfsmeta.img': File too large
Destination filesystem type is 0xef53

This was tricky. You have ext3 but apparently it's formatted with 1 kb
block sizes and according to page http://www.suse.de/~aj/linux_lfs.html
it has a 16 GB file size limit but we want to create a 123 GB sparse
file (it looks huge but it's basically empty). You can confirm that you
have 1 kb block size ext3 by running tune2fs -l /dev/hda1 | grep 'Block
size'.

You would need ext3 with 2 or 4 kb block sizes or even better using any
other Linux filesystem (I like XFS).

I also tried writing it directly to /mnt where the USB drive is mounted
but get the above, except:
ERROR(1): ftruncate failed for file /mnt/ntfsmeta.img : Operation not
permitted
Destination filesystem type is 0x4d44

This is msdos filesystem and it doesn't support sparse files.

Apparently the destination filesystem doesn't support sparse files.
You can overcome this by using the more efficient --sav-image option of
ntfsclone. Use the --restore-image option to restore the image.

I tried the recommendation, but getting the syntax of commands right in
Linux is something I am not yet very good at.

No, you did it right. The --metadata with the --save-image option isn't
supported yet by ntfsclone unfortunately.

So, you could use a Linux filesystem which isn't ext2/ext3 with 1 kb
block size then this should work.

.