Hi...

Thanks for taking time to read this ....

I have an installation of Ubuntu 11.10 that is on a Motherboard which has no on-board VGA, and compulsorily requires a Graphics card (Radeon HD 6770 in my instance).

Now the disk has one /home partition, followed by an 80GB free space, then a /boot, and a separate /, and a swap partition.

I want to expand the /home to include the available free space.
Now, the disk based installation cannot run gparted, as the partition is locked. When I use the Ubuntu 11.10 Live CD to boot, and do a "rescue installation" that /usr/sbin/gparted is not able to run - says cannot open display.

A downloaded and bootable disk made of gparted live gets stuck to a black screen. All advices including a <Tab> and setting radeon.modeset=0; or radeon.modeset=1 have failed - they all become black screen. All other given options have resulted into black screens of varying shades :-)

Somewhere, I read that doing a xhosts +localhosts helps - however, it also says "cannot open display".

Is there a way I can do this ? I am open to using any other software to do this partition expansion work as well.

Thanks for reading this and I await your advice .. all advice is welcome...

Another option is the 'nomodeset' option (this does not take a value). You may be able to access it from the live boot menu (F6 on some versions of ubuntu), or use tab to add it to the boot options line for the gparted disk.

Have you checked 'parted', a command line utility? It claims to be able to resize partitions (I haven't tried that myself).

Another possible solution would be to create a new partition (say, /opt), manually create user directories there, and link them to users' homes. This is perhaps the safest and simplest option and also works across multiple disks.

You may also backup your /home, delete it, create a new larger partition, and restore the backuped contents (you should anyway backup before resize).

If you suspect you have to do a similar tricks in the future again, consider switching to lvm.