Ok, here's the strange problem that I have, best illustrated by a generated diagram of the partition table.

http://82.42.97.63/~chris/partable.png

Yep.

And this:

Now this probably wasn't a good idea to create the partitions with those specs, and I'm now seeing this. I am running out of space on my root partition. This happened before, and I didn't keep an eye on it -- eventually Linux would not work very well, complaining of 'No free space on /'. I do not want that to happen to me again, especially when I have 20 GIGABYTES of free space sitting on the /home partition doing nothing!

I've searched around a bit, and gotten the all-too-familiar 'O..K. Can't do that' feeling when I've read how to do it. I don't mind having a command-line method to resize the paritions, but I'd like a method I can put my confidence in. I do not have any backup solutions at the moment (except for a 128MB USB Pendrive and 30MB of FTP space from my ISP, which is virtually useless in this case. I also have no blank CDRs left).

Can this be done -- reliably, safely and securely?
And also, out of interest, is it possible for the partitions to become resized automatically over time? I'm sure I set my / and /home to be around 50/50. I can't imagine setting myself around 5GB for apps and such, and 30GB for my own personal files.

While I haven't actually done this, I would suggest you check out VCOM http://www.v-com.com
and see if Partition Commander will work for you.

It will run as a bootable CD, and resize, create, format new partitions.

They suggest backing up valuable data before the resize, but it MAY work.

I know that it did resize my NTFS formatted XP partition on my laptop with no problems or data loss.

I'd really rather not pay out on commercial software for something that can be done with tools already available. I mean, I know I can do it in Linux, but the process of unmounting is a little daunting.

Do you know of any good guides for this? I've Googled, but turned up results I can't put my whole confidence in.

Do you have another hard drive available? Even on a different system that you can connect with via network? If you do the job is simple. If you don't you will have a hard time.

Basically, you need to put the contents of /home someplace else while you change that partition. You can resize / nondestructively, but you are going to lose /home.

Oh, thanks. That helps. I dropped the symlink from /music -> /myhomedir/music, and replaced it with an actual directory (probably not the greatest idea really, but the permissions are set properly. It's not exactly world writable.) and I guess I can FTP my important stuff like documents -- unless you think it's absolutely necessary I keep the home dir exactly as it is (dotfiles, etc)?

I would think that an easy way to take care of this would be to use slax http://slax.linux-live.org/ or knoppix http://www.knoppix.org/ or another live type of linux system http://iso.linuxquestions.org/. I prefer slax over knoppix, but that is based on personal preference to a specific distribution.

If you want a more advanced explanation I am the wrong guy... I take the easy way out.... otherwise why would I use linux? ;-)

Don't query the disk structure using df; it doesn't give enough information. Instead, use sfdisk -l and post that here.

Actually, you won't be able to do what you want to do without blowing off partition 6 and replacing it. You can't change the start point of a partition, and you can't resize the partition in front of it unless there is unallocated space available at the end of the partition. So partition 6 has to go.

Back up the data, blow it off, then enlarge partition 1 (which is easy to do at that point). Then recreate the other partition and reload the data.

Actually, don't try anything until you have looked at the disk using sfdisk.