So, today, I bought a Samsung T7 Shield 1TB SSD external drive, to do backups of the machines around here (only the /home subdirs) … a dedicated Leap 15.6 laptop, a desktop that has Leap 15.6 and TW, and a (cough) Window 10 laptop.
The Win10 laptop has the most data stored (about 300 mb), because we use it to backup our two Samsung smartphones.
So, the T7 SSD is pre-formatted with exFAT and I want to resize it to 400 mb. Guess what - Yast2 Partitioner does NOT support exFAT, for resizing or if creating a new partition. I want to shrink the exFAT to 400 mb and then create a new partition as XFS for all the other openSuse machine backups.
So, the big question - I’ve read some folks recommend the KDE Partition Manager. And some folks recommend GParted.
I’m leaning to using GParted, and I see there is a dedicated package available from @Sauerland as an Expert Download. I also checked using Discover (easy one-click install). Are the installs the same? Does it matter? Any advantages to either?
I must be half-asleep … I wrote “mb” (megabyte) in orig post when I really meant gb for those format values.
Anyway, I’ll try to summarize - I want to shrink the 1 Tb external SSD from 1 TB exFAT to 400 gb exFAT. Then create the remaining as an XFS partition. Yast2 Partitioner can’t.
I guess I’ll install the GParted tool found in Discover vs the GParted via RPM from Sauerland (my orig question).
Partitioning and formatting are discrete functions. Many tools exist that do only one or the other. Some tools exist that can perform both, and some of these confuse users into thinking the two discrete processes are one and the same thing. A partitioner can set whatever type its user wishes, while some formatting tools find it unnecessary conform the actual formatting type to a partition’s configured type. Windows is generally fussy about configured type matching actual format type. In Linux, the configured type is generally ignored if it doesn’t match a recognized Linux native format type.
Anyway, with a brand new disk, delete the original partition. Then using any Linux tool, fdisk, parted, gparted, gdisk, cfdisk, yast partitioner, KDE partiiton manager, DFSee, whatever, create two new partitions, preferably a 400G of type 0x07 (Windows:[FAT32,NTFS,ExFAT]), and the balance as type 0x83 (Linux). If you format the Linux partition XFS, you should be able to subsequently format to ExFAT the 400G using Windows. 100% of partitioning done here is with DFSee.
In the future, I need to be more investigative before I post. I just booted up that (cough) Windows 10 laptop to double-check the filesystem type it uses. Turns out it’s NTFS … I thought it was exFAT, but I’m rwong.
So, my decision has changed with this new Samsung external SSD drive (it uses USB-C to USB-C cord to connect to the computers - and strictly used for storing backups).
I’ll reconfigure it to have a 400 gb NTFS partition / filesystem, and the second partition / filesystem to be XFS … then I’ll go to each machine and back up the /home of each.