Resizing Persistent USB Partitions

[Nomen]

I used the Backtrack wiki to do a persistent usb install. It didn't work the first 3 or 4 times and then I tried it again and I honestly don't know what I did differently, but it worked. Although, now after I have installed python and a few other packages I was moving over some pdfs (about 25 or so) and I received a popup message telling me something to the effect of "running out of space on system"
I tried resizing with parted.
The first partition was
START 32.7kB (or right around there) END 31.0GB
and the Second was
START 31.1GB END 32.0GB
(the USB drive is 32 gigs)
I resized the first partition to end at 5 gigs but then when I went to resize the second one, first it told me that it wasn't unmounted properly and I followed what it told me to do about it and tried resizing it again. When I tried again, this time it said something like "Error incompatible features"
And listed a few of those features as well as telling me to delete them and recommended what commands to do so with. The thing is though that one of the features listed was file_system another was something "journal".
So I'm pretty sure that if I delete these, I'll have to re "mkfs" and all that or maybe even more...
So... I guess I'm just asking for any general help on resizing partitions. Specifically, should I just go ahead and delete those features and remake the filesystem and if I do, will I lose all the packages I've installed?