Please excuse the newby questions, but I have never re-partitioned a disk, and I have no test system on which to practice.

We have a RAID-10 system, the 80GB RAID is not fully partitioned, and the existing partitions are running out of space.

I don't need blow by blow instructions, but need the answers to two questions, so I can get something squared away with a vendor, who thinks the whole process can be done remotely.

Does any part of the re-partitioning process require being at a run level other than 5? I am not counting rebooting the system. As long as people are logged off, and I shut down main daemons, is that OK?

Can parted use un-partitioned space, or should I be creating a partition out of what remains and let parted deal with that?

Thank you for your help.

1. You shouldn't have to worry about runlevels, just make sure the filesystems ain't mounted.

2. man parted? http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/docs.shtml?

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IDK about RAID 10 so this information may not be relevant if RAID 10 can be used to circumvent it.

Most file system types cannot be re-sized while they are mounted, including ext3; un-mounting most file systems is not do-able in run level 5. If you need to resize / you need to boot something other than the OS on / so it cannot be done in any of your usual OS' run levels.

If un-partitioned space (or swap -- you can run without, at least while re-sizing) is available adjacent to the full partitions then you can re-size the partitions into the un-partitioned space and then extend the file system to use all the space in the enlarged partition, otherwise you can use un-partitioned space to make a new partition, make a file system in it, copy the files to it and delete the old partition. This may, of course, create un-partitioned space adjacent to a partition you want to enlarge.

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This sounds like no processes should be running that need the file system and a vendor could log in remotely. You would think unmounting file systems would become part of my vocabulary, but this is one area of things I don't touch often.

Thanks for the replies.