[SOLVED] Increase home to fill free space gap after resizing windows

tradet · 07-28-2010, 08:02 AM

Hello,

After trying out Slackware a while I've now decided to extend my /home partition as I just made a small one for testing purposes and now I have freed up space from my windows partition and I need some help to make this work.

Here the free space is between sda1 (windows) and sda2 (swap) but I would like to increase sda4 (home).

Code:

# fdisk -l

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1       10199    81920000    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2           32636       33400     6136832+  82  Linux swap
/dev/sda3           33400       35949    20474880+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4           35949       38913    23811935+  83  Linux

Code:

# cat /etc/fstab
/dev/sda2        swap             swap        defaults         0   0
/dev/sda3        /                ext4        defaults         1   1
/dev/sda4        /home            ext4        defaults         1   2
/dev/sda1        /mnt/win         ntfs-3g     umask=022        1   0

Code:

shortened lilo.conf
image = /boot/vmlinuz-custom-2.6.34.1
  label = Slackware
  root = /dev/sda3
  read-only

other = /dev/sda1
  label = Windows
  table = /dev/sda

image = /boot/vmlinuz
  root = /dev/root
  label = Fallback
  read-only

Hopefully I got the most important info right.

Thx in advance

kilgoretrout · 07-28-2010, 08:43 AM

The easiest way is to use gparted which is on the Parted Magic cd:

http://partedmagic.com/

Essentially, you move sda2 then sda3 to the left to put the unallocated space next to sda4 and then enlarge sda4 to take up all the available space. You should back up your drive to an external hard drive beforehand since moving and resizing partitions carries some risk of data loss.

You shouldn't have to change fstab or liloconf since the partition layout order is not changing and each partition will have the same device file designation when you are done. However, that fact notwithstanding, moving partitions around like you will be doing can cause lilo to no longer function. If that happens, you have to boot with a live cd, mount your root partition and run lilo -v from a change root environment:

# chroot <root mount point>
# lilo -v

That usually corrects the problem.

tradet · 07-29-2010, 02:47 AM

Thx, I'll create a backup and then I report back to you.

tradet · 08-10-2010, 03:48 PM

I managed to fix it on the first try without anything failing. Although I was kinda slow with the backup your reply was great, thx.