On Saturday 11 June 2005 8:32 pm, skyefire@skyefire.org wrote:
Well, darn. I think I'm in trouble. And I've only myself to blame. Here's the skinny: Laptop running 9.1Pro, with a / partition that was obviously, in hindsight, too small. I actually got started on trying to fix it before it hit critical, using my Knoppix CD and QTParted, but QTP wouldn't touch any hda partitions except the swap (/ and home are both reiserfs) -- the 'resize' option was greyed out. Then I was going to take it to my local LUG meeting this AM, but I had to work instead... and when I booted up, KDE refused to go past the graphical login screen, complaining about insufficient space on /. I'd quote the exact error message, but now KDE won't even give me that -- when I try to logon, I just get the 'waiting' icon for a moment, then I'm back at the login screen. So I figure, okay, I deserve this for procrastinating. I boot back to Knoppix, run parted on my USB backup drive to create an ext2 filesystem, and start trying to do a plain cp * of everything from my hda2 and hda3 into backup directories on the USB drive... and keep getting "read-only filesystem" errors. Say what? Well, I got past that, kind of, I think, and I've got backup copies of all my files (and from now on, I'm going to to full drive backups more regularly). But before I take the plunge, I thought I'd poll the list. From the looks of it, I'd guess I'm probably going to have to destructively re-part the hd, with a bigger / this time, and then copy everything back. Probably have to reinstall some stuff, too. Chalk it up to one more Linux learning experience. But if anyone knows any obvious pitfalls I should avoid while I'm doing this, I'd appreciate any advice offered.
IMHO, since you have a good backup, then you can easily delete the partitions and rebuild, but one of the reasons you cannot resize is the swap. Knoppix will detect and use a swap partition, so if that is adjacent to your root partition, you need to turn the swap off, or point the swap somewhere else and delete the swap partition. However, another possible solution is to move some of the larger directories off the root partion. You'll find that /var/log can be huge. You can copy your /var/log (or your whole /var) elsewhere, and simply set up a symlink to the new location. (You should be single user when you do this with /var since some files are used by daemons). Also note that when you run YOU, you may not have been removing sources, -- Jerry Feldman <gerald.feldman@hp.com> Partner Technology Access Center (contractor) (PTAC-MA) Hewlett-Packard Co. 550 King Street LKG2a-X2 Littleton, Ma. 01460 (978)506-5243