How to unmount the /home partition in order to be able change it's size.

When running the umount command like this as superuser: umount /dev/sda8.
I get the following message:umount: /home: device is busy.
(In some cases useful info about processes that use
the device is found by lsof(8) or fuser(1))

Thanks in advance/
larilund

Booting from a liveCD like Downloads to make the changes I have found to be best.

Make sure /home is a separate partition, not just a directory under / with:

df -l

Are you running the umount command from a terminal window from your desktop? That’s why /home is busy, your desktop is running from your home directory.

Log out of your desktop, and at the GUI login screen choose Console Login from the menu at the lower left of the screen. Log in as root and run the umount command,

umount /home

It will succeed if no one else is logged in and using the /home partition.

Am 14.10.2010 22:06, schrieb larilund:
>
> When running the umount command like this as superuser: umount
> /dev/sda8.
> I get the following message:umount: /home: device is busy.
> (In some cases useful info about processes that use
> the device is found by lsof(8) or fuser(1))
>
> Thanks in advance/
> larilund
>
>

You should make sure that no user is logged on at that moment.


openSUSE official member
LXDE team

Provided that /home is on a different partition, you can login as root

Via yast umount /home, re-size the partition and mount /home.

Whilst I never had problems with it, save your user data first !

Other than that take on the suggestion from #3 dvhenry.

cheers

I log in as root in the terminal window and then I go to YaST2/YaST Control Centre/Partitioner and unmount /home. And when I try to change the size, I receive an error message: partition /dev/sda8 cannot be resized because the filesystem seems to be inconsistent.

What is wrong?

I receive an error message: partition /dev/sda8 cannot be resized because the filesystem seems to be inconsistent.

Have you ran fsck on that file system?

I tried, but since I am not able to unmount it, I get this message:
linux-ntww:/home/lars # fsck /dev/sda8
fsck from util-linux-ng 2.16
e2fsck 1.41.9 (22-Aug-2009)
/dev/sda8 is mounted.

WARNING!!! Running e2fsck on a mounted filesystem may cause
SEVERE filesystem damage.

Do you really want to continue (y/n)?

My suggestion here is again going to be that liveCD,Downloads It’s a small download ( about 130MB) with many useful tools. The point being, you won’t receive any " filesvstem is mounted" errors and can just work on it.

That shell prompt gives away why you can’t unmount it. You are running in the directory /home/lars. Even if you were to cd to /, you might still have a GUI session with lots of processes with files open in /home.

To have a good chance of being able to unmount /home, you need to login as root from on a console, and nowhere else. But that means you have to work with the CLI.

I’m with dvhenry here: use a live CD to do this resizing. Then there is no question of it being mounted and you can fsck it for sure before doing the resize.

I think you should download GParted : GParted – Live CD/USB/PXE/HD

Then you can burn it on a CD, that you will use for the next boot.

Has you will run a system from the CD, your /home will be unmounted, and you’ll be able to resize it easily ! GParted is one of the best tool to manage partition from a live CD.

I’m with dvhenry on this as well except I add Gparted LiveCD as alternative, especially for resizing parttitons.
Browse GParted Files on SourceForge.net

GParted doc on resizin=g
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/resize/resizing.htm

Gparted has a command line section so you can fsck /home.

Gparted is the GUI partitioning tool in the suggested PartedMagic also, although if someone prefers the yast tool, or has an openSUSE liveCD alreadv, this is another option, both are built around parted.

I have found GParted to be reliable as a partitioning tool. I recently “unpartitioned”/restored the HD of an almost new multi-boot (Win 7/openSUSE 11.3/Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS) laptop. I used the Win 7 disk management to remove everything EXCEPT the three (3) Windows partitions, then used the Windows “Repair” CD to restore the boot records, all with complete success.

CAVEAT / Strong Suggestion :

Before one partitions a Windows 7 HD, create the Windows Repair CD.  This worked for me 
(not that I particularly care about Windows 7, but it protects the investment already paid for!).

Following this restore, I used GParted from the Ubuntu liveCD. I am burning the Parted Magic liveCD, and will give that a go at the next re-partitioning.