I hope this is an appropriate place to ask this.

When I installed Linux, I chose to use 30Gb for / and 30Gb for /home.

Unfortunately, this has proven to be a mistake. My /home partition is seriously full and / is only about 5%.

Is there any way to resize these partitions without reinstalling completely or screwing up the whole system - which would lead to a reinstallation anyway?

Can this be done please?


I use PCLinuxOS 2007 on an Asus A6Km laptop, with an 80Gb hard disk.

If you formatted your partition using ReiserFS, you theoretically could ("resize_reiserfs" command), but I never tried it out. Don't know about other filesystems.

What filesystem do you use?
Check here to see what gparted and associated file system specific tools support:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php

You'd have to shrink one and grow the other.

I am interested in this sort of question as well. I have a 12 GB /, formatted as jfs, and find that I need more space.

On the other hand, if i could just expand the existing partition, I have space available. I was wondering if I could resize the partition using parted and then do a remount,resize to expand the jfs file system, but I do not know whether data corruption would result or if I'd have to mount / using a livecd to do the resize, or whether I could do it logged in as root in a multiuser environment.


Any ideas, people of earth?

theapodan, by the way I have jfs too on my notebook - I decided to use that one after a small test showed that the CPU usage was the smallest one when dealing with files on a JFS partition compared to others (XFS, Reiser, ext, etc...).
But when I had to decide what kind of filesystem to use for another PC, I did a small test and saw that actually ReiserFS is quite good especially at dealing with small files (e.g. source code), so I went for it and I am still happy with it. Now that I know this I would reformat my notebook using ReiserFS. On the other side I really don't like Ext2 & 3. Have a look here at point 2b.
Why did you choose JFS?

My filesystem is ext2 - on PCLinuxOS.

you should definitely go at least to ext3

I used jfs because I saw some synthetic benchmarks that showed it with the best performance/cpu utilization ratio. I have seen evidence to the contrary, but it seems to work fine, so I haven't worried about it. File I/O is not a real big deal for me.

I also think IBM makes good stuff. We used an AIX cluster in college and it was always reliable and fast, so I figured I'd use jfs for historical reasons too.

And also, EVERYONE uses reiserfs or ext3. I have to be different.

if you don't have any file on your home so i guess you just should format your hdd and re-partitionate like this: 6GB for "/" and the rest to "/home". But how much memory do you have? you need to make a swap partition with at least 512 MB if you have less than 1 GB RAM. On my computer i got 1 GB of DDR2 and a swap partition of 2GB (it's unnecessary so much but as i got plenty of space on my HDD it's not a waste).


cheers

hehe, yeah theapodan, your last reason was as well something I thought about. But unluckily in my case the result wasn't great. Especially when I want to install some new program (I use Gentoo with "portage" as package manager which currently has 35000 tiny files in its file-database), checking for dependencies on JFS takes 20 times longer (a few minutes) than on ReiserFS, if it's the first check and the data is not yet cached in RAM.