Can an existing suse 10.0 hard drive partition be re-sized?

sirius57 · 02-09-2008, 07:26 PM

I wanted to install suse 10.3 and I have an existing suse 10.0 installation taking up the entire drive. With the partitioner in 10.0, it could not do it because it was a mounted drive. With the suse 10.3 installer, it could not create a new partition because the exiting 10.0 partitons used up all space even though the drive is 90% empty. Is it still possible to resize the partitions to make room for another installation? Is there a self booting utility available?

AceofSpades19 · 02-09-2008, 07:39 PM

I don't see why you want to dual-boot openSuSE 10.0 with 10.3, but I would suggest gparted livecd

jay73 · 02-09-2008, 07:48 PM

Yes, it's perfectly possible. Just get the gparted livecd. Or maybe I should express some reservations. There are a couple of file systems that simply won't be shrunk (xfs comes to mind, maybe reiser as well) but ext2/ext3 will resize without a problem (although accidents will happen - as always make a backup to play safe).

sirius57 · 02-10-2008, 08:33 AM

I burned a gparted image to cd and since you mentioned reservations about reiserfs, I did some digging and found a post about having to run resize_reiserfs first to change the file system size, then for step two, change the partition size. I am not sure what is meant by resize_reiserfs. What utility would include it?

jay73 · 02-10-2008, 08:41 AM

That should be handled by gparted. Just right-click your reiser partition and select "resize". If it won't let you downsize, then you know that reiser doesn't have that sort of option. In that case there isn't anything you can do except create a back-up, delete and recreate the partition (smaller of course) and then restore your back-up. By the way, I seem to remember that the gparted menus have an item that shows what gparted can do for each file system type (create, grow, shrink, etc.), that may be the quickest way to find out.

sirius57 · 02-10-2008, 04:22 PM

Gparted worked! I am posting from my resized partition of suse. Thanks for the info.