On Monday 25 August 2008 13:39, Robert Smits wrote:

Has anyone tried to use the Partition manager to repartition - that is to resize a partition without losing data?

In all but rather special cases, that's not something any simple partitioning tool can do. About all these programs do is (re-)write the partition table at the very beginning of the drive to indicate new partition starts and extents.

I understand I'd need to do it from the install disk so that the partitions on the hard drive aren't mounted, or something similar.

It is certainly a necessary condition that the disk on which you're operating not be in use at the time you perform any such manipulation.

All I want to do is trim my /home partition a little and give some to the / partition. I'm a little too close to full for my liking. I want to add another 5 GB.

First of all, to shrink a partition is always much riskier than expanding it. The possibility (likelihood, even) that some part of the file system (actual file data blocks or the file system's own indexing and organizational information) is occupying blocks all the way out to the end of the partition means you cannot simply take those blocks away from the partition without losing data and file system integrity.

I used to do this in other OSes with Partition Manager but don't trust in with ext3 partitions.

It sounds like you're talking about a particular piece of software (not generically a "partition manager / editor." If that's so, it may have capabilities not found in program strictly limited to configuring disk partition structure. I'm unaware of any such software for Linux, but that's not a particular area of expertise for me. Anyway, the only really safe way to do this sort of thing is save all the data on all the partitions, re-partition and restore the saved files. And even if there is a tool for doing this, you'd be well advised to make a complete backup first. Lastly (actually, "firstly") how much free space is left on your root? Is it really a problem? Apart from temporary files and /var, both of which can reside elsewhere, the root occupancy doesn't really tend to change much over time, unless you install a whole lot of new packages or something of the sort. There might be better ways to get more breathing room on your root partition. Clean out log files. Move /var and / or /tmp to a new partition or drive, etc.

-- bob@rsmits.ca

Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org