On Monday 08 May 2006 18:31, Darryl Gregorash wrote:

I don't know of anything that will move a Reiser partition. Given the current state of things (you have to use cfdisk, with extreme caution, making sure the new partition start point is *exactly* at the old partition start point), I won't even try to resize one.

If you did find such a utility, Graham, you'd probably want to make a backup anyway, meaning half the job is done already. Then you delete the old, create the new, restore the data and you're done. It's almost not worth it, notwithstanding the technical challenges. Carl

On Monday 08 May 2006 6:31 pm, Darryl Gregorash wrote:

I don't know of anything that will move a Reiser partition. Given the current state of things (you have to use cfdisk, with extreme caution, making sure the new partition start point is *exactly* at the old partition start point), I won't even try to resize one. I have successfully resized and moved ReiserFS partitions with QTParted. There is also a utility, resize_reiserfs.

The way I do it is: Boot a KNoppix CD or DVD. Bring up a terminal window su to root make sure that swap is turned off for the physical drive you are working with (this may not be necessary unless you are moving or resizing swap on that drive). then run 'qtparted /dev/hda' I've done this a number of times. (You can search the SLE archives since I have reported it a number of times in the past). Again, anytime you are doing this type of operation, you run the risk of trashing your data, so make sure you have a backup. In my case, I have reorganized my home system a number of times. The most recent was when my root partition was too small for one of the SUSE releases (9.3 at the time I think). I have also use QTParted to successfully resize Windows XP NTFS file systems at linux installfests, although both SUSE and Fedora installers now do that reasonably well. -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

On Tuesday 09 May 2006 10:25 am, Carl Hartung wrote:

Thanks for the feedback. More tools in the kit bag are always nice to have... you never know when you'll need "just that one." I have to admit, though, my enthusiasm is a bit tempered by two factors:

First, these tools introduce the opportunity to skip making backups, which for some people is too great a temptation to resist, particularly when they're inexperienced, too trusting and time is tight. That is system management issue. If you do not make backups, you risk losing your data. It's just that simple.

Secondly, if one does make backups, it isn't very clear to me how much time is saved by moving/resizing versus deleting, recreating and restoring. It might be a wash but the moving/resizing process, itself, introduces another layer of complexity that IMHO increases the odds of something going amiss. That's just a "gut" reflex... maybe I'm wrong. In the olden days before Linus started to use Minix, we did not have these tools. While UFS did not get fragmented like a FAT file system, it could fragment when it was close to being full. The defrag technique was to backup and restore. For the most part, a backup/delete/recreate/restore has some benefits in that you can change the file system. In the case of ReiserFS you can upgrade from 3.5 to 3.6 or to 4.0. Or you can change from ReiserFS to Ext3 or JFS.

In some cases, where I needed to resize the root file system, a backup was not a good idea. If it gets screwed up, my backup is always the install media. -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

On 09/05/06 07:19, Jerry Feldman wrote:

On Monday 08 May 2006 6:31 pm, Darryl Gregorash wrote:

...

I don't know of anything that will move a Reiser partition. Given the current state of things (you have to use cfdisk, with extreme caution, making sure the new partition start point is *exactly* at the old partition start point), I won't even try to resize one.

I have successfully resized and moved ReiserFS partitions with QTParted. There is also a utility, resize_reiserfs.

Resize_reiserfs is exactly the nightmare I was talking about. When I see "use cfdisk" followed closely by "Make sure you re-create it with the same starting disk cylinder as before! Otherwise, the resize operation will certainly not work, and you may lose your entire filesystem." I want to shoot the programmers :-) I am sure I must have seen you or others mention qtparted before, but nothing showed up when I went to google. Thanks for the reminder. I found that qtparted requires the progrsreiserfs package, which is said to conflict with the "official" reiserfsprogs from namesys (the namesys package seems to be called "reiserfs" in SuSE); I've also seen a lot of talk about progsreiserfs destroying filesystems. It is difficult to sort through this tangle of information, so if you have any observations they'd be appreciated.