I wish to resize my Redhat's /dev/hda2 (ext3) partition (reduce it's size). I have decided to follow the many suggestions found on the web which say to boot from a boot disk or live linux CD and run parted or qtparted. I have chosen to use Knoppix 3.7 with qtparted v0.4.4. (I have no wish to use the command line to accomplish this task, so please do not reply if you have no suggestions on how to fix qtparted; but kind thanks to you anyway).

The problem is that qtparted will not let me resize this partition (i.e. the resize button is greyed out). I want to know why this is and what I can do to resolve it. Again I do not want any suggestions like "yeah, I've seen that, but you can use the command line and issue (a host of painful CLI commands)" as I've seen in similar posts to a question like this. I certainly have the ability to do that. But then this defeats the purpose of having a nice GUI doesn't it.

A little more information. /dev/hda1 (ext3) Also has this limitation, but qtparted can resize all day the /dev/hda3 (linux-swap) partition. Kind of strange to me, but I admit I am not a guru about linux filesystems (which again is why a nice GUI like qtparted would be nice...if it would work).

Kind regards,
Kenneth

I wondered it this partiton was mounted and thus causing the problem, so I did an experiment. It appears not to be:

knoppix@ttyp2[knoppix]$ umount /mnt/hda2
umount: /mnt/hda2 is not mounted (according to mtab)
knoppix@ttyp2[knoppix]$ mount
/dev/root on / type ext2 (rw)
/dev/scd0 on /cdrom type iso9660 (ro)
/dev/cloop on /KNOPPIX type iso9660 (ro)
/ramdisk on /ramdisk type tmpfs (rw,size=405552k)
/proc/bus/usb on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw,devmode=0666)
automount(pid477) on /mnt/auto type autofs (rw,fd=4,pgrp=477,minproto=2,maxproto=4)
knoppix@ttyp2[knoppix]$ umount /dev/hda2
umount: /dev/hda2 is not mounted (according to mtab)
knoppix@ttyp2[knoppix]$

I don't know what restrictions there are on various partition operations, but there certainly are some sort of restrictions and it's frustrating figuring out what they are.

I suppose you already know to boot up knoppix with the "noswap" option, since you've successfully performed operations on the swap partition.

All I know is that often options on QTParted are greyed out, and I haven't figured out any rhyme or reason to it. I now carefully plan out partitioning for future needs before installing anything, because I never know whether I'll be able to change it later the way I want.