On Thursday 18 December 2003 8:54 pm, Linuxjim wrote:
On Thursday 18 December 2003 22:25, Tom Emerson wrote
On Thursday 18 December 2003 8:09 pm, Linuxjim wrote:
Can I unmount a running / partition?
no -- HOWEVER, you can unmount it if you boot from the "rescue" portion of the installation CD ...
No, I would not do that except by booting from a CD to run that program,
looks like we're on the same page here -- good :)
but am still concerned Suse would not like the change without knowing about it first.
The only part you truly have to worry about is the physical placement of the "kernel" -- the loader process is a "bootstrap" type program that knows enough to physically manipulate the drive to position the head and read sectors, but doesn't /really/ know about partitions, formats, directories, etc. Lilo [in particular] makes a "map" of where the kernel is "on the disk" so that the boot loader can simply "read" it without needing to walk directories, mount partitions, etc. But all of that is a red herring -- generally, the "kernel" is one of the first few things written to the disk [unless you compile it yourself], so it would be pretty rare for a "resize" activity to "move around" the kernel such that the loader would fail. Once the kernel is loaded, it DOES know how to "deal with" partitions, filesystem (formats), directories, and so on. At this point the root directory (/) gets mounted and the kernel can actually locate and read the remaining configuration files (in /etc...) Since the kernel will be reading the directory, any "resizing" that moves a critical file would be OK since [presumably] the resizer also rewrites the directory
You said that you installed this on a large drive ... [typically other partitions are /home, /var, and so on]
Suse is installed on hdb with two partitions, native, and swap. I would like to have one or more others just for what you are suggesting.
One thing you might want to take a look at is the LVM -- Logical Volume Manager. This lets you break up a larger disk into smaller "virtual" drives which you can resize, append, and generally mess-with to your heart's content. [you can even use this to combine two or more smaller drives into one larger "virtual" drive]
I'm not sure what you mean by "virtual" drive. When you "break up" a larger drive, does this effectively "resize" the partition (make hdb1 and hdb2 for example) or is virtual something else?
something else: /dev/vg<number>/<volumeName> the LVM is a fairly advanced topic -- one I'm still "learning" myself, so I don't feel confident in saying explicitly "do this and it will work...", but rather, "read up on it, figure out the neat things it does, backup your system, devise a "volume grouping" plan, and reinstall to implement that plan" [and, of course, restore your data from the backup...] In fact, even though I *am* using some vg's on a system, it recently crashed and the "recovery effort" I went through opened my eyes to the fact that I need to do things a little differently anyway, so I'll soon be in the backup/reinstall/ restore cycle myself ;) -- Yet another Blog: http://osnut.homelinux.net