I’ve just installed SuSe 13.1. I was running an older SuSe previously. Actually I planned to completely re-partition my HD. But for some reason I kept my old home-partition (ext3). It now occupies ~150GB, that I would rather like to allocate to the new / and /home partitions (ext4). So I deleted the old partition with the Expert Partitioner provided by Yast. Now I have 150 unallocated GB. But I am not able to reassign them to the two existing paritions, since the EP only offers maximum sizes that exactly amount the sizes of the existing partitions. Can anyone help?
Please show “fdisk -l” output (as root) in tags “code”.
Here we go. sda6 and sda7 are the concerned / and /home partitions that I want to get bigger.
Jaizkibel:~ # fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes, 488397168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk label type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x000d4fe9
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 41945087 20971520 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda2 41945715 173807234 65930760 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 4096 4208639 2102272 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 4210688 20113407 7951360 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 20115456 41945087 10914816 83 Linux
Oops, a bit a strange partition lay-out.
If I unravel this correct then you have:
[ul]
[li]sda1 as extended partition and it holds:[/li][LIST]
[li]sda5, used for Swap [/li][li]sda6, mounted as / [/li][li]sda7, mounted as /home [/li][/ul]
[li]sda2, used for ? [/li][li]unallocated [/li][/LIST]
Do you agree with that?
You can not have partitions that span two areas on the disk. A partition must be contiguous. Thus you can only expand sda2 with the unallocated space. In all other cases you must thouroughly reorganize things (read: copy all data of all partitions to other media, create a partitioning to your liking, restore the data, all done from a live/rescue system).
Ah yes, I muddled things up a bit. I actually didn’t delete the old home partition but I resized it from ~210 to 60GB. sda2 is the remainder of it.
Your summary is correct.
Ok, that’s quite a task again. Thank you for helping.
On 12/08/2013 07:46 AM, hcvv wrote:
>
> Oops, a bit a strange partition lay-out.
>
> If I unravel this correct then you have:
>
> - sda1 as extended partition and it holds:
>
> - sda5, used for Swap
> - sda6, mounted as /
> - sda7, mounted as /home
>
>
> - sda2, used for ?
> - unallocated
>
> Do you agree with that?
>
> You can not have partitions that span two areas on the disk. A partition
> must be contiguous. Thus you can only expand sda2 with the unallocated
> space. In all other cases you must thouroughly reorganize things (read:
> copy all data of all partitions to other media, create a partitioning to
> your liking, restore the data, all done from a live/rescue system).
If sda2 is unused, you have an additional option. You could delete that
partition, and then adjust the extended partition to fill the entire disk. At
that point, you could increase the size of sda6 by moving sda7 to allow whatever
is needed. Finally sda7 could be increased in size.
Note that this kind of partition adjustment is very fragile. Any power glitches
in the middle, or a transient disk error, or ??? can cause it to fail and all
your disk contents will be lost. At a minimum, you need to have a reliable image
backup. In that case, it will likely be quicker to do as suggested above.
Fragile is not good 
I guess I chose the safe option.
thx
Another thing you could do is make sda2 the full possible size and mount it somewhere on a place where you need space.
Examples:
- In fact only one user (let us assume his username is jaizkbel) is using the system. Thus almost (when not all) of the data in /home is in fact in /home/jaizkibel. Thus you could mount /sda2 on /home/jaizjibel. There will then be almost no usage of the space in /home, but it would be sufficient to hold the data of a test user or a guest user. The trick is to log out as jaizkibel, use Crtl-Alt-F1 to go to the console, login as root (yes, an exception to the rule) to mount /sda2 temporary on e.g. /mnt, then move all data from /home/jaizkibel to /mnt (copy,a), then remove all data inside /home/jaizkibel (well , you could keep it as a backup for some time), then unmount /mnt and create an fstab entry for sda2 to be mounted on /home/jaizkibel (you can use yast from the CLI to do that).
- An other example is that you have a huge amount of multimedia files. You could then mount /sda2 on /home/jaizkibel/music (to invent just a name).
In other words in depends on wherefore and how the system is used. But such a solution will give you the space without a complete reorganization.
In fact I thought about such a solution. You are right, there is only one user at the system. And indeed there is a huge directory named “Music” on sda2 right now 
So for the users side these would be suitable options. But sda6 is already at 85%. I’m afraid of running out of space there sooner or later.
I personaly would then start all over. Backup your /home, other “personal” data and /etc (for possible reference later). Oh, and a list of
rpm-qa
so you can see all packages you installed.
Then reinstall. At the partitioning proposal, go for Create Partition Setup. Somewhere there is the option to choose a disk and to say “use the whole disk”. It will then tread the whole disk as an empty one and offer you a proposal with swap, with a / of ~20 GB and the rest for /home. Simple but nice.
And when it comes to the user section, use Cange. In trhe next screen "User settings, you can check Read User Data from Previous Installation (thht is I hope that is the case). Choose, then select (maybe All, but there might be only one) and OK and Accept. That will copy the old user administration, inclusing the password to the new system.
After installation, first login as root rom the console and restore all in /home.
Result? Nice clean partition setup (sda1, sda2, sda3).
New system up and running. Thanks for assistance.
Although this issue has been solved I want to make a comment:
After taking a look at the Expert Partitioner provided by Yast I decided to install gparted (I use gnome), which I have found to be more intuitive, as it provides a graphic visualization of the the partitions and their relationship to one another. (The juxtaposition of the each partition is essential since as stated, re-sizing can only occur when partitions or unused spaces are contiguous).
You are welcome.