Partition Woes

[jbiggs77]

I have a dual book system (Win 2K and Gentoo), I made a mistake and didn't allocate enough space for linux. I resized my windows partition giving me another 2.5GB of space that I now want to allocate to linux. Output from parted looks like this:

Minor Start End Type FS Flags
1 0.031 12001.684 primary ntfs boot
2 14527.529 14574.594 primary ext3
3 14574.595 18567.312 primary reiserfs
4 18567.312 19077.187 extended lba
5 18567.343 19077.187 logical

As you can see I have a large gap from 12001 to 14527, I have tried creating a new partition using parted, but I get a segmentation fault every time, it also will not let me move partition 2. I also tried using partition magic but it has no support for reiserfs. Is there an easier way or different program I should be using?

Thanks for the help!

[SpinDizzy]

You already have 4 primary partions (the 3 primary listed + the extended), so you cannot create any more primary partitions on this drive, only logical partions inside the extended partion.

You should be able use parted to resize your ext3 partion (which I assume is /boot), but that probably doesn't help you too much.

Ideally, you need to resize the ext3 partition to use the extra space, then resize it back down to its original size, then resize the reiserfs partition (Not sure how if parted will do this on a reiserfs partion). Whether you're data would survive all this resizing, I'm unsure, plus you may have a problem with your boot loader ...

[ronmon]

As SpinDizzy points out, you are limited in your options since your primaries are all used up. Also, since your unallocated space is sandwiched between two primaries, the only linux partition you can 'grow' is partition 2 (non-adjacent space cannot be added to an existing partition).

Assuming that partition 2 is in fact /boot, your best choice would probably be deleting it and recreating it at the beginning of the free space (12001.685) after backing it up. Then make a new logical partition of what is left or, optionally, resize partition 3.

Keep in mind that for parted to work with reiserfs it needs to be built with 'progsreiserfs' (_not_ the same as reiserfsprogs). I recently did some partition shuffling and used the Recovery Is Possible CD, which worked great.