I have madk 10 official on a computer that only has a 12 gig hardrive. In the install it alloted just over 6gigs for /home and ~5 gigs for /root. I have only used 1.1 gigs of my /root but 5.2 gigs for /home. I want to take 2 gigs from /root and make /home 2 gigs bigger. This would still leave me a gig free for /root.

I have partition 8 (maybe even 9 I am at work now so dont have the disk in front of me), it is the version that re-sizes NTFS partitions. Is it safe to make this change? I dont understand why I need 3 gigs free for /root. Wouldn't 1 gig free be enough? Thanks

You can try parted (although it cannot manage ntfs partitions).

I think PM8 should do the job.

You don't need 3 gb for /root! (...you are speaking of /root and not /, aren't you?) I think 200-300 mb should be more than enough, I'd suggest you follow this guide in order to make a well partitioned system (although partition sizes are not covered).

bye.

I just let the install program for mandrake 10 official make all the partition choices. It is not a dual boot windows/linux. It is just a linux machine.

I was a little confused myself at why /root would be given ~6 gigs. When I browsed in KDE gui and checked the size of the /root folder it reported 6 gigs. But, when I was using PM8 (just to see what was reported) it reported the following partitions:

* Linux ext3 6 gigs 1.2 gigs used 4.8 gigs free Primary Active
* Linux ext3 6.9 gigs 6.1 gigs used 900 meg free Primary none
Linux swap 500 megs Logical

Linux ext3 6.4 gigs 5.9 gigs used 900 meg free Logical

The last logical partiton that corresponds to /home which needs more space is part of the second primary partition. It seems the 6 gig partition that has 4.8 gigs free is the / partition ? So regardless of what the KDE GUI reported, the 6 gig partition that has so much space free must be /. But since I have 4.8 gigs free, even if I resize / down 2 gigs I wold still have 2.8 gigs free. Then I would add the 2 gigs to the last partition listed above the logical partition that corresponds to my /home. Would this be a good idea? I sure could use the space.

Hi again!.

why don't you merge the partitions?.... in other words, if you have only a partition, you will get rid of these troubles.... you will have free space for installing programs (into / partition), and you will have free space for whatever you want to do.... well you can get into others (serious) troubles if you fill up the files system, but if you are careful....

Respect to your question, you can enlarge/reduce the partitions. You have to consider that all the programs you install will go to the / partition, and temporary data, mail spool, almost everything will reside into that partition, so if you reduce this partition you will be limited somewhat too.

bye.

Merging sounds like a good idea. But, wont that mess up my fstab entries? and thanks for the advice

well, you would need to follow several steps:

0) make backup of important data !!!!

1) make a directory into your / partition called /home2 (for example).

2) copy the contents from /home to /home2. To do that you have two options:
a) cp -a /home/* /home2/
b) cd /home2 && tar cvf home.tar /home/* && tar xvf home.tar && rm home.tar

3) comment the /etc/fstab line with the /home entry (putting a # at the beginning of the line).

4) umount /home and rename /home to /home_bak (for example).

5) rename /home2 to /home

6) reboot and check that all is ok.

6) Empty your old /home partition and merge with / partition.


....That would be all..... more or less

Woot thanks for the detailed answer