Hi, perhaps not entirely Slackware specific, but I am looking into resizing my home partition to gain more space.

Here is fdisk -l:

/dev/hda1 1 2107 15928888+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 1 4 30177 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 5 169 1247368+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda7 170 815 4883728+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda8 816 2107 9767488+ 83 Linux

Home partion is mounted on hda8, and I have a few gigs left of unallocated space after hda8 which I want to make use of now.

When I do a man resize2fs, they say ext2/ext3 partitions are resizeable, if I first use fdisk/cfdisk to delete and then recreate it with a larger size, under the constraint that I recreate the new partition at the same old start cylinder as before. When that is done, I can use the resize2fs command to resize the actual filesystem (which is still there on old hda8) to extend the whole new hda8.

But the big question now for me is, will this method destroy data on the partition? As far as I understand, it won't... I am aware of using copy & backups, and parted to recreate partions. But if this method above is supposed to work, it's pretty straightforward.

And this I should be able to do by booting from the Slackware install cd, and operate from there?

If anyone done it, please confirm if above method works, with data intact on the partition.

Thanks,

/Mack

I haven't done this myself, but technically if you destroy the partition and create a new one starting at the same cylinder, it won't erase the data as long as you don't format that drive again. So just delete the partition with fdisk or whatever and then create a new one starting at the same cylinder as the old one and give it the extra space you want to use. This should work, no reason it shouldn't, just don't blame me if it screws up .

If you are going to do it from your OS, you'll have to umount the partition before doing this to not damage anything, just in case I'd probably back up the most important files, as a general rule it's a good idea to have a back up anyways.

The method works on a primary partition; I'm not sure what would happen on an extended (logical) partition. If you do go through with this, please post the outcome.