[SOLVED] Moving and resizing partitions (including reiserfs)

lunarg · Last edited by lunarg on Tue Mar 16, 2004 3:42 pm; edited 1 time in total

Hi all.

Today I've made a wise decision :wink:

and decided to erase WinXP from my HD, and merging the free space with my / partition. However, after a brief search on this forum, my eager enthousiasm disappeared a bit: I'm using reiserfs 3.6 for my root partition, and it's not as simple as "just" moving and resizing the partitions

.

Here's my partition layout:

bombcar · Guru Joined: 08 Apr 2003 Posts: 453 Location: Wisconsin

You're in a hard state! You want to merge free space at the beginning of the drive with a filesystem at the end of the drive! Ouch.

Your best bet, in my opinion, is to use the other drive to copy to. Or get something like Partition Magic, but it would probably eat your files anyway.

If you really want to do it, here's some steps that MIGHT work......

1. Delete /dev/hda1
2. Create a /dev/hda1 the same size as /dev/hda2 (boot)
3. format /dev/hda1 the same way you did /dev/hda2, and then copy everything over (look for the Large Disk HOWTO and there is a tar command that does what you want, I believe, or use cp -a)
4. Verify that you can boot off of /dev/hda1 after updating everything.
5. Delete /dev/hda2 and /dev/hda3 (do a swapoff /dev/hda3 first).
6. Create /dev/hda2 as your swap partiton, mkswap /dev/hda2, swapon /dev/hda2, edit fstab to show changes.
7. Boot again, to verify this.
8. Now your free space is right next to the reiserfs free space, so you can begin investigating how to expand the partition. If the partition has to grow at the end, you may still have problems.

Argh! I'd just use the second disk, and copy everything over after booting from a livecd.

lunarg · Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2004 10:23 pm Post subject:

I thought so, so I started with tarring my / to another disk, then alter the partitions, then copy it back.
I think it's the safest method; maybe not the fastest, but I'd rather do this than reinstalling my entire system.

Still thanks a bunch for the help.
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lunarg · Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2004 10:24 pm Post subject:

Still one question, though.

Since the partitions all move up the line, I know that I need to update my lilo.conf and /etc/fstab.
Is there anything else that I need to change?
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bombcar · Guru Joined: 08 Apr 2003 Posts: 453 Location: Wisconsin

lilo.conf will change, /etc/fstab will change, but nothing else should change.

But, keep the liveCD handy in case something breaks!

I've done this before, so it should work!

lunarg · Posted: Tue Mar 16, 2004 3:42 pm Post subject:

Okay

I've managed to copy the data to another computer, changed the partitions, and copied it back, and my system seems to be working just fine again, and with 6gb more for my linux system.

Thanks for the help.
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bombcar · Guru Joined: 08 Apr 2003 Posts: 453 Location: Wisconsin

cool!

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=75699
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