Alrighty, my problem is i installed Opensuse 11.1 (Gnome) a week ago and put very little space into the partition thinking i wouldn’t like it, but in the short time I’ve used it i have come to love it and want to put more space into its partition but am running into an issue with it.
I want to get rid of sda1 and sda2 completely so i can get rid of the need for an extended partition, is there a way i can get the sda 5 6 and 7 partitions out of the extended partition without having to completely reinstall everything?
is there a way i can get the sda 5 6 and 7 partitions out of the extended partition without having to completely reinstall everything?
Sure. Get in a gparted-containing .iso, burn a CD, and have at it. pmagic works fine. Or just get in puppy linux, it has gparted already built-in.
For a sanity-preserving partition episode, it’s best to dd your must-save partitions to some safe place before doing your repartitioning. There is a great dd thread out in cyberspace somewhere, makes for a fun evening of reading.
The way I’d do it, is to set the sizes of sda1 & sda2 to the sizes I wanted, perhaps leaving an unallocated space, or a 3rd physical partition. I’d not worry at all about using “Extended” partition, in fact it’s common with some distro’s to just have /boot in a physical partition, and have everything else Linux related allocated in an extended one.
Then alter the partition type to Linux. Build new ext3 partitions in them.
Then I’d mount them on /mnt say sda1 is for new /, sda2 a new /home, I’d put them on /mnt & /mnt/home.
Copy data in, “rsync -cax . /mnt” which checksums the copy.
Then take it into single user mode, check the copy.
Upate the GRUB menu /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst, Filesystem Static Mount configuration in /mnt/etc/fstab to reflect the device change.
Re-install the GRUB boot loader code.
Try rebooting, find out what I’d forgotten, and then in single user mode fix, or in extreme cases boot with Live CD.
You might find it simpler to just re-install taking the expert partition option, which will let you mount your current openSUSE filesystems under something like /first, until you are finished with them, so you can copy changes you made, and keep your data.
If you decide to partition using gparted, rather than the YaST partitioner on Live CD, then I can recommend Parted Magic which is small distro, built just for this kind of job.
