Re: Resizing a hard drive

On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 07:20, Sam Varghese wrote:
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> I'm looking to resize my hard drive - I have 3 gig of vacant space lying
> at the end of the drive and need to use it.
> 
> I've looked at parted and while the theory seems fine, in practice
> things don't seem to pan out.
> 
> My disk has a small boot partition, a root partition and swap space. As
> per the theory, I have to remove the swap, recreate it at the end of the
> drive, and then expand the root partition to take up the remaining free
> space.

Knoppix will find swap and use it; as mentioned in a previous reply you
will have to turn swap off.

> The problem is finding boot disks for parted. There are two, a boot disk
> and a root disk. The boot disk is fine but the root disk appears to have
> a file which is more than 3 meg. I'm puzzled as to how one can dd this
> on to a floppy - but then my understanding of this is limited.
> 
> I did try a Knoppix CD but when I run parted from the CD, I get a warning
> that my swap partition is in use. Funny thing is a df doesn't show this.
> I'm cautious because a wrong step would end up screwing up five years of
> running without a reinstall.

The Knoppix CD has QtParted, which is a qraphical frontend to parted,
and does make it very easy to use. I successfully resized (down) a
Windows XP partition the other day on a laptop, and then created a
couple more partitions in the free space. Worked really well.

df will not show up swap space (nor will mount), but free will.

As long as you have backups and be cautious before clicking buttons you
should be fine with something like QtParted.

Andrew Laird.