Partition table a bit messed up

[Novack]

Hello all,

I've been using Gentoo for about 1,5 years now (on a home server) and sometime ago I switched over to a bigger hard disk. I did an image with Norton Ghost and wrote it over to the new HD and booted up with it. Everything worked fine, except that I had foolishly used the Ghost's resizing ability, which of course does not work with non-Windows filesystems.

Now I have a situation where sfdisk shows a full sized partition (hda3) but when I check empty space with df it shows a smaller partition. The partition is only partly formatted, because Ghost succeeded in changing the partition table but could not format the extra space.

Now can I somehow change the partition table to correspond to the real situation without losing data? Then I could proceed by resizing the partition with tools better suited for it

Here's the sfdisk -l output

[aetius]

The simplest answer to your question is: re-ghost, but don't let it change the size this time. Then proceed on with what you want to do. Ghost 7.5+ supports ext2/ext3 resizing (it does it by re-creating the filesystem) but it appears to have failed or you were using a non-ext filesystem.

[Novack]

Problem is that I don't have the original Ghost image anymore. It took some time before I noticed that it didn't resize the partition properly. (In retrospect I should have realized it beforehand, but it's too late now.)

[aetius]

Hrmm. After some digging, I *think* the parted "resize" command may do what you need. I'd investigate that. I've never used it before, but it will resize the partition and the filesystem if necessary, and thus should be able to correct the problems Ghost introduced. This is an unusual situation though, and there's no telling how parted will react to a setup like that.