I have a hd5 (?) of 10 GB for the system OS. I had used about 7 GB and believed that adding software from a NIC would not greatly exceed space on this drive but was wrong - it now has about 40KB remaining. The system has a 2GB swap drive elsewhere on the SUSE 10.1 Enterprise desktop system, 127GB HD total. The total HD has about 63 GB of "unused" space - in the hd6(?).

I could not expand the hd5 partition using the on-board partition software and did not know how to handle it so rebooted. Now the system will not start since there is not enough space. My questions: 1) How can I/can I us the on-board partition expansion SAFELY to expand the 10GB to 20GB from a scripting bootup or similar? 2) I have GNU-parted but could not install it on the Linux before rebooting - not enough space. Can it/should it be expanded on a floppy drive or similar and be used to expand the hd5 partition? I do not have another Linux machine. How can I get out of this fix?

More info: Are there other ideas?... such as creating another partition, 20 GB as hd7, moving all hd5 info. into it (by script since I cannot boot up?), then deleting the orignial hd5, and renaming the new partition hd5?

I would recommend using a live-cd like partedmagic, which you can burn from a windows computer.

Btw, if you ran out of space as a normal user, there is usually some space specially reserved for root in such a situation (likely 1-5%). You might be able to do a “Single/Rescue-mode” login (depending on what your distro calls it) and recover from there, although you will need to be adept at using a terminal.