It’s a fairly standard set-up but the root partition is almost full (I know it’s fairly unheard of but I have a lot of software provided by uni that takes up a lot of space). I would like to shrink my /home partition and increase the root one.
I’ve downloaded gparted and got it onto a live CD. The only thing I really want to know before I go ahead is how will the editing of the partitions affect booting. From what I can tell from reading is that the MBR has only got listed the place on the HDD where the bootable partitions start. These starting placed will not be affected by the alteration, so will the system quite happily boot in the same manner?
One booted I’m assuming as the /home partition will have moved I’ll need to alter fstab to mount /home again. Will having /home missing caused any adverse affects on the first boot into linux?
sebpinski wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have a dual boot system on a 500GB HDD. Here is a printscreen of the
> partition table for the disk.
>
> [image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2955604/disk.png]
>
> It’s a fairly standard set-up but the root partition is almost full (I
> know it’s fairly unheard of but I have a lot of software provided by uni
> that takes up a lot of space). I would like to shrink my /home partition
> and increase the root one.
>
> I’ve downloaded gparted and got it onto a live CD. The only thing I
> really want to know before I go ahead is how will the editing of the
> partitions affect booting. From what I can tell from reading is that the
> MBR has only got listed the place on the HDD where the bootable
> partitions start. These starting placed will not be affected by the
> alteration, so will the system quite happily boot in the same manner?
>
> One booted I’m assuming as the /home partition will have moved I’ll
> need to alter fstab to mount /home again. Will having /home missing
> caused any adverse affects on the first boot into linux?
>
> Thanks for any advice.
first: it is kinda hard to believe that your university has filled up
20 GB with required software (that is a LOT of software)…i mean
that MAY be the case, but i suspect you have some files in /tmp that
can be dumped (the right way, which is NOT to just go in and delete
them while the system is running)…and i guess you might have some
huge log files in /var/log either because someone is hitting you
firewall 40 times a second trying to get in, and every instance is
being logged…OR you have not set up your logrotate to archive
(reduce size) of logs you need to keep, and then automatically delete
some when they get too old to be useful…
second: do not do anything with gparted until you have a viable
backup of ALL data and system settings you want to keep–it may go
smoothly but it is GOOD PRACTICE to never add, delete or adjust
partitions in any way until you have a good backup that you KNOW you
can restore from (TEST it!)
third: i’ll let others tell you how to find the wasted space or clean
out /tmp or adjust log rotate–or you can use the forum’s advanced
search function…and, i guess if you search for subject lines with
these words you will find MANY threads:
I’m fairly aware of how to search the forums thank you.
I don’t want to start an argument but to blatantly try and tell me that I’m unaware of the size of the software installed on my machine is a little low. I have all the usual stuff along with 4 different packages that are each over 2GB in size. Maybe that’s why it’s full?
sebpinski wrote:
> I’m fairly aware of how to search the forums thank you.
>
> I don’t want to start an argument but to blatantly try and tell me that
> I’m unaware of the size of the software installed on my machine is a
> little low. I have all the usual stuff along with 4 different packages
> that are each over 2GB in size. Maybe that’s why it’s full?
excuse me…your basic questions on partitioning didn’t show me you
have lot of Linux experience… sorry i assumed since you didn’t seem
to understand the Linux file system you might be getting ready to
shoot yourself in the foot instead of easily solving the problem
exactly the way most of the folks coming here with a full 20 GB
root partition do…
now, i’m kinda afraid i’ll accidentally insult you again, but let me
try to help anyway, now that i know you are not new to this system:
“The only thing I really want to know before I go ahead is how will
the editing of the partitions affect booting.” well, there is no way
to know if it will affect booting, because you didn’t give us enough
information to decide…from what you showed we can’t tell if you are
booting with grub, grub2, LIDO, an unknown third-party boot manager,
or if the boot code is in the MBR or daisy chained…
df -h
sudo /sbin/fdisk -l
cat /proc/partitions
cat /etc/fstab
mount
“From what I can tell from reading is that the MBR has only got
listed the place on the HDD where the bootable partitions start. These
starting placed will not be affected by the alteration, so will the
system quite happily boot in the same manner?”
that may or may not be true depending on the options you selected
during initial install…and, what you selected we can not see from
the info provided…however, the above info should fill us in nicely,
and then we can answer…
“One booted I’m assuming as the /home partition will have moved
I’ll need to alter fstab to mount /home again.”
no, fstab doesn’t track and won’t care where on the hard disk /home
begins or ends, as long as it is in the same partition before and
after…i couldn’t guess why it would need to be changed, unless you
moved it to a different drive, or partition…
“Will having /home missing caused any adverse affects on the first
boot into linux?”
why would home be missing? oh, now i get it, you think it will be
missing because is has different beginning and ending spots…nope.
–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [posted via NNTP w/openSUSE 10.3]
Be it ever so humble, there is no place like 127.0.0.1.
