move extra space from one partition to another

wit_273 · 05-23-2007, 11:43 AM

I was wondering if there was a reasonably safe way to reallocate space from one partition that has too much space to another partition that needs more space. I need 5G extra on / I was wondering if there is a way to reduce /var by 5G and reallocate that space to /. I am guessing that is not really possible due to /var being on SDA6 and / being on SDA3. Other discussion I have read on this refer to partitions that are next to each other, I suspect that is the only reasonable way to accomplis this. But if someone knows a way that I can accomplish this I would appreciate the howto. Thanks.

Systems current partitions if this helps.
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 ext3 4.9G 3.2G 1.5G 69% /
/dev/sda1 ext3 198M 16M 172M 9% /boot
/dev/sda2 ext3 26G 18G 7.3G 71% /home
none tmpfs 1014M 0 1014M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda6 ext3 36G 13G 21G 38% /var

Thanks for any assistance or advice,
George

jay73 · 05-23-2007, 01:38 PM

Is it correct that sda3 and sda6 are separated only by sda5? What is on sda5 and what is its size? Any free space on it?

btw, which distro are you using? That would be good to know because I have noted that some have little tolerance for experiments with the disk layout.

pixellany · 05-23-2007, 02:15 PM

fdisk -l
to see all of the partitions

df
to how full they are

You can re-size any partition and then re-size another one to use the space that is freed up. Backup any important data first.

good tools for re-sizing include GParted and QTParted

lein · 05-23-2007, 02:27 PM

I'm just looking at what you have there. Is sda5 your swap partition?

Code:

sda1 /boot
sda2 /home
sda3 /
sda5 /swap?
sda6 /var

If you had somewhere you could copy the contents of sda6 (BACKUP) to you could possibly make it smaller and then just shuffle sda5 along, making your logical partitions smaller. But you very well could (will?) loose data from sda6. It might just be easier to backup up /var remove sda5 & 6 use gparted to make root(sda3) bigger then just put /var back in a smaller logical partition - being sure to have it still located at /sda6 you don't want things looking for it there if it ends up in another partition.

wit_273 · 05-24-2007, 11:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lein

I'm just looking at what you have there. Is sda5 your swap partition?

Code:

sda1 /boot
sda2 /home
sda3 /
sda5 /swap?
sda6 /var

If you had somewhere you could copy the contents of sda6 (BACKUP) to you could possibly make it smaller and then just shuffle sda5 along, making your logical partitions smaller. But you very well could (will?) loose data from sda6. It might just be easier to backup up /var remove sda5 & 6 use gparted to make root(sda3) bigger then just put /var back in a smaller logical partition - being sure to have it still located at /sda6 you don't want things looking for it there if it ends up in another partition.

SDA 5 is swap. The system is FC4, we decided that we are going to update the system to RHEL4 and use our NAS for the extra space needed (it does not actually have to be on / as I originally thought). It is just going to be too much trouble and too big of a risk to resize partitions. Thanks for all the help if I do have to resize partitions on a system in the future this will be helpful.

George