Problems trying to resize an Ext3 partition
 

Firstly I am not sure whether this is the right place so sorry if it isn't.

My aim is to resize two of my partitions (/ and /home) which are both 30 GB each so that I can resize another one and install a few more distros.

Here is are my system specs:
Custom built
AMD Athlon XP 2600
2x 256mb DDR PC3200
PC Chips M848a Motherboard
2 hard disks
Master: 4GB 5200RPM (/dev/hda) - 1 partition used for Windows ME, FAT32
Slave: 80GB 7200RPM (/dev/hdb) - 6 partitions: /boot ext3 94mb, linux swap 1024mb, /var (I think) ext3 5gb, /home ext3 30gb, /mnt/win_c2 (storage for odd files) fat32 (so I can share it with Windows) 10gb, / ext3 30gb
Windows ME and Mandrake Linux 10 (upgraded from 9.2)

What I am hoping to do is resize the /home to 10gb and / to 10gb, then maybe increase the size of /mnt/win_c2 but probably just install a few more distros in the free space.

SystemRescueCD seemed like the perfect choice to do this as it had all the tools I needed and I didn't have to install anything (I am fairly new to Linux so not having to install anything seemed good). So I downloaded 0.2.13 and burned it.

When I tried to resize the partition using QtParted the option was blanked out. I did a bit of searching and found this was because it does not support ext3 so I should convert the partitions to ext2 first.

So more searching and I did that.
I then ran QtParted again and the option was available, but when I tried to resize them I get an error message: "An error happen during ped_file_system_open call." More searching and I found I should try using GNU parted instead.
Running "parted /dev/hdb" gave me a warning:
I chose to ignore it. I then typed "resize 7 6134.225 16000" but that gave me the following error:
No Implementation: This ext2 file system has a rather strange layout! Parted can't resize this (yet).

So that leaves me to where I am now. I have searched and searched but can't find an answer so thats why I chose to post here. I have converted the partitions back to ext3 so I can use my system.

Thanks for any suggestions,
Luca

Hi,
I have found that resizing partitions is a rather insecure procedure. The best thing is to remove all important data from it, erase them, and create new ones.
You can also shrink you swap size, 1024 is huge, unless you run specific software like video editing or math modeling...
The parted warning shouldn't be serious, I have seen it a few times. But do backup data in /. Its a good idea.
Also, this first 5400 disk is lowering the performance of the 7200. If you have a free ide slot on the second controller, put it there.

Thanks for that. I was going to do that if there was not anything else but as there doesn't seem to be I did it. I was kind of dreading it but it wasn't as bad as it sounded. At the moment I have just changed my /home partition into my / partition and moved all the appropriate files around. Everything seems to be going ok but I need to change the permissions for a few files I think - for some reason they have changed.

I don't think I will bother resizing my swap partition yet as every so often I do fairly memory intensive things (such as editing MASSIVE images, e.g. a 15mb PNG). Also it would probably be more trouble than it is worth moving all the partitions around. If I need that space though then I may consider it.

Unfotunately I don't have any free ide slots to move around the slow hard disk but now I have some extra space I may move the Windows partition from there to my faster disk.

Thanks again for your help. :D

I'm glad to know!

A way to discover how many ram/swap you are using is to have a running copy of gkrellm during computer usage. I am doing this for some time now, and I found out that I don't use more than 5MB swap peak. Kinda surprising if you think I have 256MB ram. Linux is really good at memory management.

Ok I will have a look at that. If only XP could handle memory that well. *Comes back down to Earth* Thats another thing to add to the big long list of advantages of Linux. Gkrellm looks good but it is a bit small, I have a 13 inch (viewable) CRT monitor at 1024x768. I will just have to run top every so often and see what is being used.

Also since I have moved the partition around I have been having a problem. Now su doesn't work. It just says the password is incorrect (even though it isn't). I have checked a few other things and all of the permissions seem to be the same. The permissions for /etc/passwd are (running ls -l /etc/passwd):
and the file is owned by root/root.

Re: Problems trying to resize an Ext3 partition
 

I think parted is having some issues with ext2/ext3 partition resizing. It should be able to resize the partition but can't:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla...g.cgi?id=90894

I'm having the trouble. If I can get it to work, I'll post it up here.