Hi, I have Mandriva 2007.1 x86_64. I want to grow my /home partition to use more of the SATA disk. I backed it up of course :-). I logged on as root, so I could unmount /home, went into Mandriva Control Center, and unmounted /home. Then I attempted to resize it from 50GB to 100GB, however I got an error that resize2fs failed. Mandriva Control Center still shows the partition as 100GB, but KDiskFree shows it as 50GB. The partition still mounts and is accessible. Since Mandriva Control Center did not work, I installed QTParted. I opened that up and it also shows the partition as only 50GB, not surprising since I am pretty sure nothing really happened except that Mandriva Control Center has the size wrong now.
In QTParted "resize" is greyed out :-(, why? Why will it not let me resize it? I have also ran fsck on my /home partition and it finds no errors. Please help me resize my partition. Thanks.

What partition type is it? ext3 maybe? Or some other journalling?

You got that right that it needs to be unmounted before proceeding. I haven't worked much with these recently, because usually when I deal with my partition table I just take backups, remove everything, re-create what I need and put backups back. Easier that way..and with proper backups some crap might be left out too. Anyway. I have two thoughts which you could consider; the otherone is that journalling might have something to do with this. I'm not sure, and I guess it doesn't, but if you can't figure anything else out, think about it. The other option is that (if you now have free space on the disk) the partitioning program (qtparted, parted, gparted, you name it) might play tricks on you - a simple test for that could be to create a new partition of any sort into the free space, launch your favourite partitioning program (say Qtparted), then use it to remove the partition and then resize. This sounds stupid (to me at least) but I recall I've stumbled upon this sort of problem myself..worth a try if nobody can give a direct answer.

Anyway I would just pick up one tool and use that, and not mess up with several. The "control center" tools are fancy yeah, and could actually be using the same "backend" than some other tools, but I guess it wouldn't harm to stick with one app, so at least it knew what's happening.

Yeah it is ext3fs.

Now that I actually did a web search for this, here's something:

howtoforge.com/linux_resizing_ext3_partitions

it seems to do what I suspected a bit, turn off the journalling of ext3 before resizing, but as I haven't done that myself I couldn't say if it's about that or not. If it was, I would assume (stupid me ) that the program could do it automatically.

Thanks for your help. I tried creating a partition using QTParted in my free space and to commit it gives a warning to unmount ALL of the partitions on the drive, so I think I will shutdown (so all partitions are unmounted) and boot from a live CD and see if I can resize the partition.

I guess I am used to the Windows way of repartitioning using such tools as Partition Magic or Hard Disk Manager, where you make your modifications and reboot to take effect, which obviously is doing an unmount, but how come the Linux utilities can't do the same thing? Just a thought.

Yeah, I just used the Mandriva One 2008 Live CD and resized the partition no problem :-D.