Resizing partition

Question

When I added arch to my system dual booting with Windows 8 I only gave it a total of 32GB, but now I would like to have more space. Is it okay to use Window's partition tool to expand the partitions, or will Arch freak out that the partition is bigger than it expected?

Answer 1

@Arctus, I think that you are thinking of this as a single thing.  But there are actually a couple distinct things going on here.  There is the partition itself, which is the container.  Within that, there is the filesystem that actually is the structure that holds the data.  So while I agree with you that you cannot resize Linux filesystems with windows, it could most certainly deal with the ms-dos partition table (MBR) no problem.  Also, no one in their right mind would try to use FAT or NTFS for a Linux filesystem.  They are both not POSIX compliant, and the necessary permissions would not be retained, which would likely prevent the computer from really running at all (not to mention NTFS-3g is a fuse filesystem, and I'm really not sure about using that for a rootfs).
@OP, Typically, in my head, and in other places I have read, the first partition is though of as being to the left, and the last to the right (like how you would read a line of text).  So assuming this notion of HDD layout, you could shrink your windows partition, then boot into a live linux distribution and use gparted to move sda3 to the left.  But this is what I was saying was dangerous above.  It can be done, but there are great risks to your data involved.  So if you do this, you should back up your data first.
But if you are going to back up your data first, then you could simply rsync the entire system to a backup HDD.  Then simply delete all sda{3,4,5,6}.  Shrink the windows partition and then create the layout you want with new partitions.  Go back into Linux, make the filesystems and mount them after creating the necessary mountpoints for them (as though you were doing a new installation).  Then simply rsync the data back to this new filesystem.
A third option would be to actually create a new rootfs in the new space taken from windows.  So you would make a new partition all the way to the "left" and then simply rsync or dd the current sda3 to this new space.   You would then keep moving all the partitions over to the "left" and then extend what you needed to.  The only problem with this is that since you use ms-dos (MBR) partitioning, you are going to probably not be able to create more partitions since you already have 4 primary (well 3 primary and one extended).
I would use the rsync method.  I have used it many times in the past and it is very reliable.  The neat thing about Linux (*nix in general) is that everything is a file.  So you can actually just move all the files to a new location, and you *should* have a copy of the original.