Something weird is going on here...

I had a partition layout that looked something like this:
hda1: NTFS partition for XP
hda2: FAT32 partition for storing data to be accessed by both of my os's
hda3: FAT32 partition for my Windows swap file (for performance reasons)
hda4: extended partition for SUSE 10.0
hda5: logical ReiserFS partition for /
hda6: logical linux swap partition

As I am migrating from XP to SUSE, I found myself running out of room on hda5, and not needing the space on hda1. I also decided that a performance tweak like giving XP its own swap partition wasn't worth the disk space since I so rarely use it anymore.

The version of QTParted on my Knoppix CD is buggy and has a lot of limitations that made it unable to make the partition changes that I had in mind, but errors in the partition table kept me from using PartitionMagic.

I dug up a copy of TestDisk on the web and was able to fix the bugs in the partition table so that PartitionMagic was functional. Oddly, PartitionMagic does not seem to support ReiserFS. It reported hda5 as an Ext2 partition with no free space.

I shrugged (probably a bad idea) and moved on, changing the disk arrangement to this:
hda1: smaller NTFS partition for XP
hda2: larger FAT32 partition for storing data
hda3: ReiserFS partition for SUSE converted from logical to primary
hda4: linux swap partition converted from logical to primary

It wouldn't let me resize hda3, so now it has some unallocated space on the disk before and after it that I want to resize it to fill up.

I booted to the SUSE install CD1 and used the system repair utility to check out all of my file systems, fix fstab and grub for the new partition arrangement, etc.

Everything SEEMED to go well (fsck says that hda3 is fine), but then grub wouldn't load, so I ran the system repair utility once more and it started fussing about hda3 being full and throwing errors at me about initrd errors and being unable to write the grub configuration. I tried yet again, but this time I used the update tool, as if I were upgrading to SUSE 10.0 from SUSE 10.0.

It keeps insisting that hda3 is full and that I should resize the partition. It had free space before to the tune of a few GB, but now even QTParted in Knoppix reports it as being completely packed, without even a single MB free. On top of that, I can't find any type of partitioning tool that will allow me to resize it.

I am suspicious that ParitionMagic pooched the partition when it converted it from logical to primary while treating it as an ext2 partition.

What's my next step? Is there a tool for repairing/manipulating ReiserFS partitions?

TIA,

J

First I did not think one could convert a logical partition to a Primary partition. Haven;t used Partition magic in years after so many problems or patches required to run. According to the parted website http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/ it says the beginning sector of the partition can not change so one can only resize starting from the end and grow or shrink from there. It can not shrink or grow from the beginning point. Sounds like the partition is corrupted unless you can match exactly where it was before the changes.

Brian1

Yes, I read that on the parted man page. But, is that a limitation of parted or a 'feature' of ReiserFS?

Maybe I could try to copy all of the data from the Linux partition to my 'data' partition in Knoppix, then delete the corrupted partition and recreate it.

If that would work, how do I get write access to the partition? Knoppix mounts it as read-only...