Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3254 mails)

[Anders Johansson <andjoh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 26 September 2002 05.05, robert73 wrote:
> Hello  All
>
> Ive been away from Linux for about a year but I made it back and
> purchaced and installed SUSE 80 professional. Its a very very nice
> looking system. My problem is that I seemed to have screwed up the
> sizing of partitions. I have lots of free space but somehow managed  to
> make / too small (go figgure)
>
> ;-)
>
> I dont know what I was thinking... is there anyway I can fix this
> (reclaim space from another partition)??
>  I have nothing on /work
>
> If I have to re install I will but would rather not
> the /oracle_store is on another drive and I have no data on it...
>
> Ideas
>
> Thanks
> rob
>
>
> Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hdb5              1028060    920624    107436  90% /
> /dev/hdb6               514028     36672    477356   8% /boot
> /dev/hdb11            10241084     33008  10208076   1% /home
> /dev/hdb12             5124536     32840   5091696   1% /local
> /dev/hdb9              5124536    471364   4653172  10% /opt
> /dev/hda2              9486084     72432   9413652   1% /oracle_store
> /dev/hdb7              5124536    888752   4235784  18% /usr
> /dev/hdb8              5124536    107432   5017104   3% /var
> /dev/hdb13             6891636     32840   6858796   1% /work

You can resize partitions, but your partition table is a little chaotic so 
it's a little tricky to say just how you'd do it. There are a number of 
options open to you

The simplest risk-nothing way would be to use the symlink trick. Pick a 
directory on the / partition that uses up a lot of data, copy it to a 
partition with a lot of space available (such as /work for instance), delete 
the directory from / and symlink it to the new directory on /. Depending on 
which directory you move you may have to do this from the rescue system.

Another option is to use LVM. With this you could merge the / and /work 
partitions and make them look like one partition to the system. Boot from the 
rescue system, copy all data from / to a temporary storage (on /oracle_store 
for example), create an lvm partition on / and /work and copy everything back 
to the new partition.

A third option is to actually resize partitions, but you can only use space 
physically adjacent to the original partition, so with your layout you're 
going to need to move things around.

And finally the fourth option, as you mentioned, is to reinstall and get it 
right from the beginning :)

It can be done, but you'd have to decide which method you want to use. Then, 
the exact details depend on where your partitions are (fdisk should tell you 
the starting and ending cylinders of each partition) and also which file 
systems you use for each partition.

Let the list know how you want to work this, and I'm sure someone here can 
help you

regards
Anders