Hi all!

I have been happily using debian for a few months now, and someone told me I should try SuSE (better hardware support, yast, a cool little lizard, blah blah blah). so I did, and resized my debian reiser partition to allow room for SuSE. Having decided that SuSE isn't for me (kde problems, vid card problems, etc) I've removed it and now want to reclaim those 5 GB at the end of my harddisk. I removed the SuSE partition, so there's just 5G of unused disk space adjacent to my debian partition.

I tried resizing in parted, and it said it didn't have reiserfs support. If I remember correctly, the command resize_reiserfs only resizes the filesystem, not the partition. So I would like to know how to resize a partition which is currently formatted with reiserfs (without losing data).

Any suggestions much appreciated!

It's a 2-step process. You resize (delete and re-create) the partition first (e.g. using cfdisk, change the higher number to fill the empty space) and then expand the filesystem (using resize_reiserfs). It works. But be aware that you could always lose data (resizing is a risky process).

(see 'man resize_reiserfs' for more info)

I understand why that *should* work. But I've got a question: once I delete the reiser partition, I then create a new partition using all free space. Now, as long as I don't format that partition at all, the filesystem (and the data) from the old one is still there? and can be resized using resize_reiserfs??

Or, do I need to format the whole space with reiser before doing the resize? (I assume not; that'll kill all my data, right?)

btw, had never heard of cfdisk (yes, I'm a noob); it looks nice. More polished than parted, but lighter (much lighter) than qtparted.

If you resize the partition only (not the filesystem) you will still be able to acces the data, but there will be the same space available as before. One important point is that the first cylinder has to be identical to your previous setting! Otherwise you'll lose the data. After that, you can extend the existing filesystem with resize_reiserfs to fit the new partition size. When I did this, I took extra care not to exceed the partition size. However, I am not sure if resize_reiserfs would accept such a setting anyway.

I assumed the partition is formated with reiserfs already. If you create an new filesystem (mkreiserfs), you will lose the data.

Ok I'll try that. I'm going to back up some stuff first, just in case :-)