Can I change hard drive partition sizes?

I recently set up OpenSUSE 11.0 on a MSI Wind and have 20 GB for the root partition and approximately 117GB for the other partition. I know I won’t have 117GB of user files but I may have over 20GB of programs.
Is there a way to resize partitions after an install? I want to decrease the 117GB partition to approximately 95GB and increase the root partition to approximately 42GB.

You can resize with gparted.

But 20GB is quite a bit. I have a pretty full system (including lots of stuff in /usr/local) and I’ve only hit 10GB.

Thank you for the advice. I am new to Linux and used to Mac and Windows so 20GB didn’t seem like much but maybe it’s much more than I realized. For now I will keep the partition as is.

Very unlikely. My root partition has ~12GB of files, and I have a lot of software.

I have Sled 10-SP1 installed on a multiboot system with WinXP . The machine has 80GB and the XP partition has 40GB. When I installed Linux it created the /root partition with 10GB, /swap with 2GB and /usr partition with 25 GB.

Now I’m down to only 1.3 GB of free space on the /root partition and 13GB of free space on the /usr partition.

I would like to resize the /usr partition to a smaller size and add the free space to the /root partition. However, I don’t know if I can do this while running Linux. Also the /usr partition starts/ends after the /root. So not sure if the free space after resizing is accessible to /root if it comes after /usr.

Can someone tell me if this is possible and the best way to do it.

Thank you

Hi Danielap,

You bet - you can run gpartd and resize the partitions, shrinking the /usr partition and expanding the / one.

The easiest way would be to boot to some kind of live CD such as Ubuntu, Knoppix, etc. Nearly all of them have gparted - it has an easy to use GUI interface and is pretty self explanatory.

Here is the official how to: GPARTED DOCUMENTATION - RESIZING and anther one here Modify Your Partitions With GParted Without Losing Data | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials

Now - if you really want to see something cool you can install parted magick. It installs a seperate kernel and adds an option to your grub, you can boot directly into a complete stand alone linux environment from your hard drive - no CD necessary - and use gparted there. Then you also have this as a stand alone environment for future troubleshooting. It’s basically like having a Live CD on hand, but no CD or CD ROM drive needed.

(Note the official Parted Magick site partedmagic.com is temporarily hacked, but you can view a cached version on google and still see it, etc.)

Cheers,
Pete

Double-check that /usr is not in fact /home. It is extremely unlikely that the installer would separate /usr or that it would be that large.