How to link "free space on Hard Drive to LINUX"
 

Hi all,

I have Linux 2.6.9-11.EL running on machine. It is taking only 15 GB in my hard disk (80 GB).

the command "df -h" result :

--------------------------------------------
[naveen@LocalHost ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 15G 14G 247M 99% /
/dev/sda2 99M 8.5M 86M 10% /boot
none 189M 0 189M 0% /dev/shm
--------------------------------------------

I came to know there is a free space of 51 GB on my hard disk from hwbrowser command.

The hwbrowser command's information on Hard Drive :

-------------------------------------------
Device Start End Size(in MB) Type
==> /dev/sda
sda1 1 1306 10245 fat32
sda2 1307 1319 102 ext3
sda3 1320 3231 14998 ext3

sda4 3232 3362 1028 extended
sda5 3224 3362 1028 linux swap
3363 9964 51778 Free Space
------------------------------------------

I am getting errors like "low disk space" whenever i try to install some softwares, Because of this restricted memory (15 GB).

Please guide me how i can make use of the "Free Space" on the hard disk for linux (means to extend the 15 GB linux to some 40 GB).

Thanks and Regards,
Naveen.

Extend your root partition, if possible, or create a new partition out of the free space and mount it under your root; maybe move some places to be mounted on that partition (/var or /usr for example). The process depends on how you've done your partitioning; is it "old-fashioned" plain partitions or are you using LVM, for example.

Which distro is it? If it is a newer Red Hat or Fedora Core, there is a graphical program /usr/sbin/system-config-lvm where you can add the free space to the logical volume. Or you can do it from the command line. ( See "man lvm" ). For SuSE, there is a Partitioner program in YaST2 that you can use. Other distros may have a similar program.

If you have partitions mounted traditionally, you could create a partition in the free space and then move contents of the largest directory there. For a workstation, /home is usually the largest. Installing new software, it usually gets installed in /usr/ somewhere. The /usr directory will grow in time and is the normally the second largest directory, so it would make a good candidate as well.
For a server, you may have a small /home directory. Moving /usr or /var might make a better choice.

Good Luck!