Resizing ext3 partitions

m0p · Apprentice Joined: 20 Jun 2005 Posts: 205 Location: en_GB

I have 4 partitions, /boot (sda1), swap (sda2), / (sda3) and /home (sda4). My root partition, I find to be too small for my needs. How would I go about shrinking my home partition by a few gigs and adding the free space to the root partition? Can anyone suggest me an app (preferably GTK based)?

EDIT: Also, can this be done with the partitions mounted? I tried gparted, but mounted partitions were locked. Would I have to use a livecd to do this? I think I have knoppix around here somewhere.

HermanR · Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2005 11:22 pm Post subject:

Well, you should NEVER (tm) do this (or be able to do this) with mounted partitions.

You can try parted with the qtparted Qt-frontend. But I'd recommend to back up all your valuable data (and configs) first. I tried something like this on a reiserfs-partition lately, which did not work out too well. But that may be partly due to reiserfs, because a rebuild of the filesystem did not go too well. (To be sure, I did not loose any valuable data; just a lot of the filenames were gone and replaced by incomprehensible names in lost+found directories.)

Good luck - you'll need it!
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Gentoo (64 bits) on AMD64 X2 4400+, MSI K8T Neo2-FIR, 2 Gb RAM, 320 + 160 Gb SATA, nVidia Geforce 6600

m0p · Apprentice Joined: 20 Jun 2005 Posts: 205 Location: en_GB

Well, ext3 is pretty solid. I am sure I can do this without losing any data, since I've hardly filled my home partition. So there is nothing I can lose from making it smaller.

HermanR · Posted: Thu Jul 21, 2005 7:55 am Post subject:

Yes, ext3 is pretty solid. I switched to it too on my new computer. :-)

So go ahead and try parted/qtparted, but it doesn't hurt to backup your valuable data first.
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Gentoo (64 bits) on AMD64 X2 4400+, MSI K8T Neo2-FIR, 2 Gb RAM, 320 + 160 Gb SATA, nVidia Geforce 6600