I recently re-installed RedHat 7.1, and allowed the install to automatically create the partitions. Now, when I do cfdisk, I see that there is 276mb of unallocated 'Logical' free space. This is only a 3gb drive, so I'd like to reclaim this space. Can you give me specific instructions on how (if possible) to do this? Saying simply 'use fdisk' won't help me, if you know what I mean....

Thanks in advance.

this greatly depends on your partitions and how they are on the disk

if the free space is adjacent to the partition you want to add it to then you can do it. if it's not then you would have to delete partitions between the two.

post your partition info


[root@microdot /root]# fdisk /dev/hda

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 2432.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2432 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 804 6458098+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 805 811 56227+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 812 2432 13020682+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 812 1334 4200966 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 1335 1367 265041 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda7 1368 2432 8554581 7 HPFS/NTFS

Command (m for help):

here is what cfdisk /dev/hda gives me:


Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hda1 Boot Primary Linux ext2 [/boot] 53.68
hda5 Logical Linux ext2 [/] 2493.78
hda6 Logical Linux swap 404.62
Logical Free Space 276.63


(sorry about the formatting, it looked fine when I posted it...)

So, it looks like the swap partition is between the one I want to enlarge (/) and the free space. Is it safe to pull down the swap partition, resize the / partition and then create the swap again? I have a 333mhz, with 256mb RAM, and I don't think I've ever seen the swap space utilized.

Thanks again for your help, I appreciate it.

you can unmount and delete the swap partition, grow the / partition and create a new swap partition at the end.