Hi all,

I have a CentOS machine that is in a dedicated hosting environment. Those kinds of place just give you a hard drive with everything except boot and swap on one huge partition. Obviously, it'd be nice to create some other partitions for at least my user data if nothing else.

I've been reading various articles online about parted and other tools, and some people say you need to be able to use a boot disk to do anything to the root partition (take it offline), but other pages seem less clear about whether or not I could split or shrink the root partition remotely (I have no physical access to the machine) without the ability to use a LiveCD or other such tool.

Am I out of luck?

TIA!

Maybe not *entirely* out of luck, but it's a sketchy situation..

The easiest idea is maybe to ask your host provider to partition the drive how you want it, or *atleast* to shrink the root partition down to a reasonable size, thereby allowing YOU to remotely partition the remainder of the drive however you see fit.

One thing is certain: you cannot re-partition or alter partitions if they are mounted. This is why one typically either uses a live CD such as Gparted, or maybe a USB device with a partition-tool on it, as opposed to repartitioning drives from within a running OS, though, you CAN do partition jobs from within a running OS but just not any operations on the mounted root or any other mounted partition.

Yeah, sketchy, that's what I've started to feel from the situation and my own research. I think I'll ask if the provider will do it or just settle for one big fat partition and make regular backups. :-)

Thanks for the response.