Resize a unmounted partition?
 

Is it possible to resize a partition without booting into a live cd such as knoppix? I have a 500 gb sata disk split into 4 partitions. I would like to resize sda3 and sda4 down to about 75 gb each which would leave me 150 gb to install another distribution.

Could I use a tool such as gparted to do this while the system is running? I would prefer not to boot with a live cd as I need to continue working while this process happens.

df -kh

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 148G 14G 127G 10% /
udev 1.5G 440K 1.5G 1% /dev
/dev/sda3 148G 47G 94G 34% /vmware
/dev/sda4 159G 42G 109G 28% /samba


fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00091291

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 588 4723078+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2 * 589 20169 157284382+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 41221 60801 157284382+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 20170 41220 169092157+ 83 Linux

Yes you can resize an unmounted partition with GParted from within the running OS. I have done this several times from within Ubuntu.

If you unmount them, you can resize them with parted. Of course, you would back up all important data BEFORE you resize.

However, since you already have 4 partitions you will be unable to create another partition until you change sda4 to be an extended partition. Then you can create up to 11 logical partitions. If working involves your /samba or /vmware partition then the answer would be only if you move everything to /. As stated backing up everything would be a very good idea.