On 03/23/2016 09:05 AM, Tom Kacvinsky wrote:
I made the fundamental mistake of not giving enough space to the / partition, and now I find I cannot install further updates because I am out of disk space.
gparted was recommended to me, and I have taken the live ISO and “burned” it onto a USB memory stick. I’m having problems booting my laptop with it (endless cycle of “rebooting in 30s”), but I think I can get around that with the latest pre-release of the ISO.
In any case, what I would like to do is think /home (on an XFS partition) and use the extra space to grow the / file systems (btrfs). IS this even possible. I did not find any documentation on who to do this, but that’s probably because my search terms were not refined enough.
Any help would be appreciated.
Yes, anything is possible ... BUT TAKE BACKUPS FIRST ! I got sick and tired of this "provisioning' problem; its not new, I deal with it back in the old UNIX days, long before Minix, never mind Linux. Somewhere around the advent of the 500M disk for home computing I started to make use of the Veritas manager, which I'd been using a form of on the Big Iron UNIX such as AIX. We know that as "LVM" today. It slides a layer of indirection under the file system so that the partition boundaries can be altered dynamically. Some file systems, such as ReiserFS, which I favour, can be grown and shrunk while running. When I first had to convert to LVM I did it this way: The machine had the ability to support more than one hard drive, so i plugged the 'new' drive in. I partitioned it with a space for /boot and for SWAP. Having those on 'real' partitions makes some kinds of debugging easier. The rest of the disk I devoted to LVM. I use the YAST partitioner, which is pretty smart, to create LVs in that LVM for the file systems I wanted, some slop space and some space left unsigned. Using rescue mode I mounted both the old drive and the new, with LVM active, and rsync'd across what I wanted. The comes the tricky part. I had to chroot to the new drive, mount everything there and do the mkinitrd with everything on the new drive. Oh, and make a new MBR. I didn't get it right the first time. To be perfectly honest there's a LOT I don't get right the first time. THAT'S WHY I MAKE BACKUPS! That was a long time ago. Now I am of the opinion that I can't live without the flexibility that LVM gives me, not only in regard to resizing, but in the ability to deal with multiple spindles in an arbitrary way, do some but not all mirroring, some but not all striping, try out other file systems and thrwo them away. I'm not saying you couldn't do this with hard partitioning and lots of free disk space and time, but I can do it without ever needing to reboot, all quite casually. The only time I'd run into your situation was if I ran out of absolute disk space. With terabyte drives that's not likely now. And, more to the point, if I did on the drives I had, then i just add another spindle, put a LVM volume on it and extend it as part of the group and expand onto that. Of course if you have the BtrFS "one file system to rule them all" approach, where BtrFS has taken over all of your spindle, /boot and /home and everything, then the same thing can apply, but then you wouldn't be in your present situation. Personally I think LVM offers more flexibility. But then I'm a bit of an experimenter. When Linda made a good case for XFS I tried that and eventually made use of it for my Videos. I can set up ext4 with different characteristics 'side-by-side' and compare them, then tear it all down. And do this all without rebooting. If a file system claims to be able to expand and contract, I can experiment with that, again without rebooting. This long weekend I plan to try converting my RootFS from BtrFS to ext4FS, again using a LV created just for that purpose, rsync'ing across. That will require the kind of chroot/mkinitrd and a reboot. Of course being a LV, I can switch back :-) But I will make backups, just in case :-) ALWAYS MAKE BACKUPS! -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org