Can I safely resize my partition from its beginning?

Question

Currently dual booting Windows 8 and Linux Mint 14, sooner or later I will give more space to my Linux system.

Is resizing my Linux partition from the beginning a safe operation ?

If yes, could you provide the name of an utility that would help me achieve this ?

I am asking this because systematically when I did that under Windows using Acronis Disk Director the system was broken, I couldn't boot to Windows anymore because of an NTLDR missing. So unless I thought in advance to make a recovery disk I was unable to use it again !

Answer 1

gparted is a nice GUI tool for resizing partitions, or ext partitions at any rate. I have not tried it on NTFS filesystems, although apparently it can.

So yes, you can resize now or later. Just backup your personal tish first, just in case. Of course, if you know what is good for you, you keep that backed-up anyway ;)

Note that you should not resize a mounted partition, so if you want to resize /, you will have to boot a live CD (I'm sure they all have gparted) and do it from there.

Answer 2

Yes you should be able to re-size your partitions.

To be completely safe, download and burn a Live CD with gparted on it.

Note that some filesystems, such as xfs, can only be grown.