I am about to use parted to resize /dev/hda3............which is the home partition on my current running distrobution.

It begins at 2988.655 and ends at 79316.594.

Now if I start the partition at 2988.655 and end it at .......say 40000.000 will I loose all of my information contained on that partition?

Is there some reason you can't just repartition with fdisk while reinstalling your Distro?

Well now I guess not! But would'nt that just defeat the purpose of learning how to do something?

Whats the point in destroying the set up of my current distro when I dont have to? I've been running this distro for some time now and have things set up! If I whipe the...........................nevermind

tnaks for your help!

Good question. I am not familiar with how ext3, reiserfs, etc works but heres what I know.

Under a Window fat and ntfs, files get degragmented due to the way in which data is placed unto the drive. If the partition were to be resized before it was defraged, data could potentially be lost.

With ext2,3,etc.. for whatever reason defragging is not necessary.

Whether this is a risk or not will be related to the following.

Are you under ext2, ext3, xfs, jfs, reiserfs, etc?
You should be able to go to their sites and find somebody who can help on how safe they are to resize.

Secondly, parted is a very low level and a very small tool. As a rule of thumb of mine, I donot expect very low level applications to handle complex operations. My guess is that that does not exist as of yet.

Finally, I made an assumption on what you mean by the program "parted". I am assuming GNU Parted. If that is the case you can go to their website: http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/#documentation
There is some interesting information there.

Hopefully this helps some as I donot know the answer myself.

----
Almost forgot
If you have enough space available, you can backup the entire partition image with the following simple command:
This will copy partition 1 on harddrive A and save it in the image file harddrive.img

after that you can burn it to a cdrom or transfer it on a net to another computer.

Unfotunately, I've only copied from a partition image, I am assuming that copying to a partition image would be like the following But make sure you have all of the partition settings down so you can resize it back and then restore in case anything goes wrong.

shotokan,
I have posted my thanks to you in our other post and thanks again for the link. Didnt mean to sound outright with you back there, but I wanted information that would help me not distroy my distro. I have a pet peve about installing and reinstalling a distro when it is really not nes.


Yerp,

Thanks for all your help, but I gotta tell you Parted is about as low level as a nine-hundred story building........lol. It's actualy a very complex program to learn, which is why I was trying to find information about it's usage (and probably why I found none). I enjoy learning everything I can about the tools I have available to me.
Parted is an very good partitioning solution. It's more detailed than other partitioning grams and allows you full control over your partitioning schemes. I think ill use it from now on as my main part-gram......as soon as I learn to use it fully.......lol.
And no, by resizing /dev/hda3 I did not loose any information, nor did I corrupt any files. I have an 80 gig seagate drive with the majority of the space on that partition. I just cut a little off the end.

matthewa,

yes, go for the qt version of parted.

Also check out partimage, D*** fine backup tool. Has limitation that to restore an image, it does need (at least the version I am using!) a partition, unformatted if fine!, that is the exact same size as the one that was backed up. Having said that, I _have_ restored to one that was a tiny bit larger, YMMV...

Linux Rocks.
Best!,

thanks robert, ill check that out.

speaking of which, there are two great features of qt_parted

1) The embedded compile time option allows support for framebuffer support

2) It supports ntfs resizing, for all you win users. (and for converting )

Of course the downside is that you need to install qt, which takes about just as long as compiling glibc with checks!

And then theres my problems, I use these graphical frontends and get spoiled, resulting in not fully knowing parted!

My second problem is actual. It seems I might need to download their libreiserfs. I cannot seem to compile reiser support into qt_parted..

All in all, qt_parted is indeed worth looking into; But as far as learning, it might not be what you want; but then, I can't possibly know what you like!