GNU parted: Too scared to repartition running system...

plate

I don't know how you feel, but parted sends shivers down my spine. Moving chunks of data around the disk like there's no tomorrow, filesystem and all, is something I've never understood, and my anxiety grows when I think about what I have to do to make space for yet another Gentoo installation, my seventh or so, on increasingly fishy hardware...

Here's the plan. I have a 30 GB disk that's partitioned like this, courtesy of an existing Mandrake installation:

Wiebel · Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2003 5:07 am Post subject:

OK partitioning is one of my favourites :roll:

First of all:

It's really important do keep track of what you're doing so write everything down.

I had, compared to you, a really grim mess in my partition Table.
I was also afraid of yousing parted, so i did the long, but safe(r), run.
If I understood You right, there is only one Partition that shouldn't get damaged, so it won't be too hard.
You want your 25G home partition moved to your new 5G root so I assume it's not too full.
First you should delete all partitions you won't need. Be brave.

Ahh and write it all down all starts and endings and everything as long as you won't run mkfs or dd all can be repaired (if your part.table is very special there are more detailed infos under the x command in fdisk, but you won't need it, at least I think so)
If more than 3.5G of your home is used, you have to resize hda6 with any tool, i haven't done that so far, but I think it's easy enough.
Then create some temporary primary partitions do do the swapping. If the size differs like with your /home you can e.g. build an 3.5G hda1, or to save time just the size needed for your actual home data then mkfs hda1 mount .. mkdir home .. cp ..
If you want to keep hda1 it's starting to get fishy, but after resizing hda6 you can create a primary partition after the others eg hda3.
You can delete hda2 and recreate ext under hda4 without loosing any data, so again be brave.
Basically you have to do the same as defragmenting manually and with bigger blocks.
I actually made a spreadsheet for assistance, in every case you have to make a roadmap of what you will do.

Use dd to copy whole partitions and cp -a like you know it.

You should think of the benefits of lvm or evms.

At last to cheer you my old and my new partition Table (both work):

jgmcbride · n00b Joined: 16 Feb 2003 Posts: 27 Location: New York NY

What about simply putting a second hd in the machine temporarily.Mount this drive and move your data to it. This should then free up your initial drive to reinstall.

Alternatively since you have a Win partition then try Partition Magic. I have used it manytimes before and it has never failed me.

plate · Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2003 5:55 am Post subject:

I'm sorry, but neither do I have a Windows partition anywhere on this disk, nor space for a second disk, let alone any desire to rip this one out of its bay and put it somewhere else, for that matter. It's a notebook so crammed inside I'd have to completely take it apart to get to the disk. I did that once to replace the original 2 GB disk that was in there, and I have no intention to ever do it again...

Wiebel, aren't the extended partitions affected by deleting hda2? I can resize hda6 and create additional partitions further down towards the end of the disk rather easily, but squeezing in additional primary partitions further up the disk? How do I let hda5 and 6 know that they now belong to hda4, not 2 anymore?

gilesjuk · Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2003 2:00 pm Post subject:

You can actually run Partition Magic from floppy, two disks are required but it does provide you with the full interface of PM.

jgmcbride · n00b Joined: 16 Feb 2003 Posts: 27 Location: New York NY

From what I can see your Win D: drive is the killer here. 10 gig.
If it is full then you have large problems. If you are only using a small portion of it then zip and move this data to your Win C: drive. The objective here is to get your data off Win D: before you play around with it. You can then use parted to resize it.

If you have a spare machine you can always backup your critical files to another machine either with laplink or over the network.

I would expect that you have all your critical files backed up anyway. I have found that even a complete reinstall is not that big a deal for me. I place all my critical files (where possible) in one or two directories and then simply have to back these up. After I rebuild I simply have to restore these and after about an hour's tweaking I am ready to go again.

Let us know when/if you have your D: drive backed up and we can address it from there.

bluesky · Apprentice Joined: 14 Aug 2002 Posts: 230 Location: USA

Your partition layout looks good and if I understand correctly, you ONLY want to keep /dev/hda1 so it would be pretty easy to do. Just "rm" /dev/hda2 then start from there.

Gnu Parted is not difficult to use but you need some time to get used to it. And you only need to use parted to "resize" /dev/hda1 which should not cause any problem but reread the manual about "resize".

The remaining operations you can use fdisk and mke2fs. I suppose that you are familiar with fdisk. :wink:

_________________
bluesky

"free as the wind"

plate · Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2003 3:23 pm Post subject:

Sure. No, what's baking my noodle is how to resize hda1 while it's mounted, and how I can save hda6 from being blown into oblivion when I delete hda2...

The only thing I can think of is to tar everything on hda1 into a file in /home, resize and move hda6 to a place somewhere up the drive, boot from floppy, resize hda1, make2fs, mount hda6, untar, edit fstab to reflect all of Mandrake in hda6, boot Mandrake, fdisk again, now comes the tricky part: delete hda2, create hda2, hda3, hda4? Will that work without hda5 and 6 getting lost?

jgmcbride: I don't have a D: disk. You're talking to the wrong person, try reading the top post in this thread... gilesjuk: Partition Magic doesn't even support the filesytem I currently have on that disk, let alone any of those I intend to put on there.

bluesky · Apprentice Joined: 14 Aug 2002 Posts: 230 Location: USA

>what's baking my noodle is how to resize hda1 while it's mounted,

use parted floppy.

Sorry I didn't know that you want to keep /dev/hda6 too. Hmm this is going to be tough. Surely, if you delete the extended(hda2) then you will lose everything in it including hda6. If hda1 has enough room you can move the data in hda6 temporarily to it. if not you can try to move it some where else to another hard disk maybe. The last option is to resize hda2(extended) at the same time make sure that after resizing it still includes hda6. Theorically it should work but I haven't done this before so you will be on your own. :wink:

_________________
bluesky

"free as the wind"

plate · Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2003 12:50 am Post subject:

Wiebel · Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2003 4:15 pm Post subject:

abhishek · Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2003 9:32 pm Post subject:

When you reinstall, if you do, you might want to use LVM and/or EVMS as they both make it easy and safe to resize paritions, among other things.

Wiebel · Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2003 2:25 am Post subject: