Resize or move root partition

Hi,
During install process I assigned only 6GB for my root partition and now I’m almost running out of space. I have 11.1 installed and I wanted to update to 11.3 but there are problems with i855 video card with newest distro versions so I won’t install it.

Since everything is installed and configured I don’t want to install 11.1 again.


Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x5949fa83

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        1305    10482381   83  Linux
/dev/sda2   *        1306        9728    67656705    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            1306        2522     9774080    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6            2523        5133    20972857+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda7            5134        5199      530113+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8            5200        6520    10610901   83  Linux
/dev/sda9            6521        7304     6297448+  83  Linux
/dev/sda10           7305        9728    19469312   83  Linux



/dev/sda9             6,0G  5,2G  507M  92% /
udev                  483M  768K  482M   1% /dev
/dev/sda8              10G  9,0G  547M  95% /home
/dev/sda5             9,4G  7,9G  1,5G  85% /windows/D
/dev/sda6              21G   18G  2,6G  88% /windows/E

Can someone tell me if it is possible to move whole root partition to sda10?
If yes what steps should i perform(i’m not a power user)?
Regards :slight_smile:

Can someone tell me if it is possible to move whole root partition to sda10?
You could use a liveCD, delete sda10 then resize sda9 to use the free space, What is on sda10?
Your /home is also nearly full, you could share that space between ‘/’ and ‘/home’, but this involves more, and likely to include editing grub and fstab. (because you would change the start position of ‘/’ )

I have to say: not being a “power user” and trying to do what you want may not be compatible, since it’s not straight-forward. Whatever you do, make a FULL backup to an external drive of ALL your partitions. Maybe even take your hard-drive to a shop and ask them to clone it for you, since creating a fail-safe backup of a multi-boot system (one you can actually restore back to) is also not easy.

Having said all that - if you still want to undertake all this, you will have to start reading up on a couple of things. I find Swerdna’s article: Backup Restore Images of Hard Disk Drive Partitions is a really good one. It’s mostly about backing up and restoring partitions, but again, if you try to resize partitions without having a backup, you are asking for trouble…

I have 11.1 installed and I wanted to update to 11.3 but there are problems with i855 video card with newest distro versions so I won’t install it.
You could also try the 11.2 liveCD, if all works well, you could do a fresh install deleting sda8, sda9 and sda10 and set up partitioning as you want, then restore home from your backup.

If yes what steps should i perform(i’m not a power user)?
You are likely to get more suggestions yet, when you decide how you would like to go about this the details will come.

twelveeighty wrote:
> if you try to resize partitions without having a backup, you are
> asking for trouble…

+1
but, you misspelled ‘begging’… :wink:


DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [posted via NNTP w/openSUSE 10.3]

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

Thanks for quick responses, I agree that I have to be carefull with data when playing with partitions, I learned this lesson some time ago when ended up with broken partitions table after messing with this.

There is no need to resize home partition, I agree it is small too but there are some big files which i can move around or transfer across network to restore some free space.

sda10 it’s ubuntu 10.10 root but it’s unneeded since I have to work and don’t have time for visiting forums for weeks and trying to solve network and graphics problems when everything is working fine, here on 11.1. Basically that’s why i don’t want to install distro with kernel affected new Intel’s driver - I already experienced this and I don’t like this kind of ‘improvements’ :stuck_out_tongue:

So - the best idea is to remove sda10 and resize sda9, there is less risk to resize sda9 than move it’s content to sda10?
At first i thought that i will move root to sda10 - in case of troubles i can edit config files and come back to current situation.

So - the best idea is to remove sda10 and resize sda9, there is less risk to resize sda9 than move it’s content to sda10?

IMHO, yes, you are only expanding the file system, no data needs to be moved.