Changing partition sizes

[Kurt Granroth]

Jim wrote:
> I currently have the following partitions:
> 
> [farli@tesla farli]$ df
> Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda1              1718336    246440   1384608  15% /
> /dev/hdb1                 5823      1085      4438  20% /boot
> /dev/hda6              1154808    128120    968024  12% /home
> /dev/hdb3              1898964   1327036    475464  74% /usr 
> 
> I am soon going to upgrade from Mandrake 7.2 to 8.0.  Is there an easy way 
> to expand the /usr partition at the expense of either the root partition 
> or the home partition?
 
Yes, you can.  The basic procedure would be to shrink the /home
filesystem using ext2resize[1].  Then, need to shrink /dev/hda6 to the
same size using fdisk.  Then, increase /dev/hdb3 using fdisk.
Finally, resize /usr using ext2resize.

There is also a program called "parted" that may do all of that in one
step[2].  I have never used it, though, so I can't comment.

As you can imagine, this is a very delicate operation that could make
you lose quite a bit of data if done wrong.

You might want to strongly consider using a symlink hack.  Just make a
directory like /home/local and create a symlink from /usr/local to
/home/local (for instance)

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/)
[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/parted
-- 
Kurt Granroth            | http://www.granroth.org
KDE Developer/Evangelist | SuSE Labs Open Source Developer
granroth@kde.org         | granroth@suse.com
            KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop