Here's the situation.

My laptop is dying. Old age. I think the board is going. The other day I was playing swat4 and it tripped off. Then that scent of buring silicon every tech knows comes up. Damn. Something burnt on the board and now the fan comes on like full blast (in windows)-I'm afraid some chips may burn out. However IF I boot into linux and set the throttling to powersave, all is good and the system works.

So Tux saves the day.
I wanna dump my windows partitions and from this
windows-15G
linux - 10g
swap - 700M
data - 32G

and resise my drive to this
linux -10G
swap - 800M
home/data partition- the rest


I don't wanna risk reinstalling cause I swear this thing is gonna go up in smoke.

How do I dd it?

The least amount of refomatting could be had if you reformat /dev/hda1 (was ntfs) and use it for the /usr partition, and reformat the /dev/hda4 partition and use it for /home. You might want to temporarily give them different mount points, such as /mnt/usr and /mnt/home, so that you can copy the contents of /usr and /home to the new locations before making the final change to your /etc/fstab file.
Before rebooting, A) rename the old /home and /usr directories and create new (empty) directories for the mount points. For example /home -> /home-old; /usr -> /usr-old. This way, you won't be mounting over the previous directories which would hide there contents. Then if everything works out, you can delete the old contents.

P.S. That must be some game to burn out the processor like that! I though that was just a Sci-Fi plot gimmick.

Take care of the overheating first. You are on borrowed time. It could be dust build-up.

You could play Towers of Hanoi to move stuff around on a running system, but it is tricky because /etc/fstab would be needing editing and you need to reboot after repartitioning. If you cannot move the stuff to another drive, just re-install.

if you cant move to another drive just put in a liveCD and resize from there. DSL should work fine

All in all I figured it out.

jschiwal, thats I good idea. I didn't think of reusing space to avoid formatting. Will put that to good use on some failing drives I've come accross.


I did scrap it down and had the fins dusted out with compressed air a couple of months ago.
And yes I moved the partitions and forgot to update /etc/fstab


tamoneya, the live-cd yes, but I was trying to avoid cause most live cds have acpi management but no processor throthling. <I did have to use it at some point to fix /etc/fstab> lol



Heres what I did
1-used cfdisk to delete the ntfs partition
2-created back a 10gig root /
unfortunately <and I don't know why> the recreated partition came up 32bytes short
causing this command to fail <cause its smaller>
3-I then recreated the new.to.be.root partition 10 megs larger and came up with this when formated

which you can see is larger than the original so the dd command above worked.

4-When the dd copy finished I mounted and chrooted into /dev/hda1 to reinstall and reconfigure grub <and yes I shoulda remembered to fix the /etc/fstab too>
5-Rebooted and it mounted /dev/hda2 <oops> fixed that to /dev/hda1
5-Reboot and here I am. YAY!


Thank you all in your advice.
I'm gonna reclaim my unused space and fix my other partitions!

Brain surgery was a success!

YaY! I'm happy I was successful.

One more thing
second partition in /etc/fstab

/dev/hda2 /mnt/Data reiserfs defaults,user,rw 1 1

I can mount the filesystem as a user but I can't write to it.

---FIXED>had to mount it and THEN chmod -R 0777 /mnt/Data as root