Is it safe to use Gparted to resize Windows partition?

My 16GB Windows partition has already ran out of space (1GB left) and i want to resize it to 48GB. I already have free space prepared from Disk Utility.

Is it safe to use Gparted LiveCD to resize the Windows Partition? Or would it break the Windows Partition?

If it won't work, what other methods do I have?

I've already tried making a disk image of the volume and restoring it to a new partition as a test, but it failed to restore. The disk image was NTFS but it restored to the partition as FAT32 and failed to mount it, nor repair it.

Could I create a FAT32 or NTFS partiton on my external drive, then copy the Windows to that, then recreate the partition and copy it back?
And if I do anything like this, would I need to use a different OS that supports NTFS, like Linux? I'd probably use a LiveCD of some distro.

Can data be copied between FAT32 and NTFS freely or would it alter the data? Can I copy all the Windows files from the NTFS partition to a FAT32 partition, and would it boot?

z31fanatic said:

Did you use Bootcamp for the Windows installation?

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I did not use Bootcamp assistant to install it but I installed the Bootcamp software in Windows. This makes no difference though.

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Does anyone here have experience resizing partitions with Gparted?

mtasquared said:

I never used gparted. I have used ipartition with good results. Search this site. You can't just put windows on any old partition and expect boot camp to work. The partition has to be formatted on the mac side with what is called a GUID table. Make the partition with ipartition, then run bootcamp assistant in the utilities folder to format it as a boot camp partition. I could be wrong about some of these details but forgive me I'm getting old.

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I don't know what you are talking about. I already have a partition. It already works. I just need to resize it.

The hard drive uses the GUID partition table. My installation is exactly as it would be if I used Bootcamp Assistant, but Bootcamp assistant wouldn't install anything other than Windows 7.

chrfr said:

You are very likely to break your OS X partition if you use anything other than Apple's tools to repartition a disk with a Boot Camp partition on it.

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No, I am much more likely to break the Windows partition. I'ave already created free space in Disk Utility, so Gparted would not touch the OS X partition at all.