Need a "Pros" help with drive partitions
 

I am quickly running out of disk space on my root partition.
I have an 80GB hard drive dedicated to my Linux install.
It is divided into three separate ext3 partitions, /, /swap, and /home.
The drive is a Serial ATA drive.
The partitions are named sdb1 (/), sdb2 (/swap), and sbb3 (/home)
The root partition is 10GB, swap is 1GB, and home take up the remainder.

I would like to shrink my home partition to free up space for my root partition.
I think another 10GB would be good.
I have tried booting from the CD and running qtparted.
Qtparted will not allow resizing of any of the partitions.
Yes, they were unmounted.
I'm not sure if this is a limitation of qtparted or if it is a problem accessing serial ata based drives.

I do not want to re-install linux.
I have allot of software installed and am quite happy with my setup the way it is.
My install is perfectly tweaked and I would hate to start over.

Is there any software packages out there that would work with ext3 partitions?
They could be Windows based as I run a separate drive with a WinXP install.
I hope someone here has some solid suggestions.

Debian Unstable
Kernel 2.6.10
KDE 3.4
Promise PDC20376 (FastTrack 376) SATA controller
80GB Sata HD
ext3 partitions

Try parted.

If you wanted to move around your partitions, you should consider using LVM in the future. Otherwise, here are the limitations.

http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/

Well it looks like parted isn't going to help if the start of the partitions can't be changed.
If I understand this correctly, even if I could reduce the size of my /home partition I wouldn't be able to move it down to make room to enlarge my / partition.
Even if I was to clone the entire drive to a larger one the / partition would be the same size with the extra space after my /home partition.

Is there any way of imaging, copying, etc. to get around this?
There must be some trick to getting this done.

Perhaps you could shrink ~/ and then make new paritions and mount
points for /usr and /opt or whatever's filling /

Maybe you wanna consider changing the way you use the root partition, instead of going through all this. My debian sarge with full kde and lots of multimedia software takes ~2.5GB (/ plus /usr, 1000MB + 2.5GB, see below). Notice /tmp and /var don't have a separate fs. The entire disk is 80GB.

df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 2.8G 1018M 1.9G 36% /
tmpfs 252M 0 252M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda6 56G 27G 30G 48% /backup
/dev/hda5 12G 6.0G 5.3G 53% /home
/dev/hda3 4.7G 1.5G 3.2G 32% /usr
tmpfs 10M 748K 9.3M 8% /dev

Maybe its worth auditing the root partition and figuring out what's taking all this space. If you don't do that, you risk adding more 10GB and end up filling it up again. 10GB is a huge root fs.

Anyway, if you really wanna do this, google for "system rescue cd", and partimage. Partimage is a great software to clone and backup your partitions, and rescue cd is the perfect tool to run it. Running these tools from cd will keep you from mounting/unmounting problems.

Good luck!

Just an idea of a partitioning scheme that works for me:
I didn't re-read the thread, but you can always backup
your data, maybe only ~/ and configs under /etc are what
you'd need, then repartition and reinstall. I had to do that
once because my / is small and I forgot to make an /opt so
when I built K3B if overfilled / and wouldn't install.