Hi All,

How would I go about doing the following.

I have a redhat 7.2 server currently with 2 file partitions / and /home The machine is booting of sdb, which is a hardware RAID5 array. (sda is temporary storage [non-raid]).

df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 9.9G 2.6G 6.8G 28% /
/dev/sdb2 56G 16G 37G 29% /home
none 250M 0 250M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 2.4G 1.7G 626M 74% /mnt/sda1
/dev/sda6 14G 13G 531M 97% /mnt/sda6

fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 8841 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 1316 10570738+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 1317 8710 59392305 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 8711 8841 1052257+ 82 Linux swap


I created a directory called /home/groups for people to share files and quickly realised that with user quotas on /home this wasnt going to work well.

What I want to do is shrink the /home (/dev/sdb2) partition by 16GB and created a new ext3 partition and mount it as /groups this way I can implement separate user and groups quotas on different partitions.

I've never done this in Linux before. The only partitioning I've done is with disk druid at install time. How would I do this? Are there any issues with repartitioning with either ext3 or RAID5. I would guess that as Linux has no idea its running on hardware raid that it wouldnt matter, but if anyone has any experiance with this sort of thing I'd love to hear about it.

gnuparted is what ya want for resizing ext2 partitons, i know it is ext3 but that is the same filesystem type as far as the partition table is concerned, of course i would always back up my stuff before attempting this.

Thanks for that, I'm running through GNU-Parted on a test system and its working a treat. The docs in /usr/share/docs/parted<version-num>/USER were really straightforward.

I have a couple of questions though.

Is it advisable to unmount a partition before modifying it with parted or doesnt it really matter?

Back when I installed redhat 7.2 in diskdruid (the redhat install time partitioning tool) I specified some partitions to have a label ie - /home /var /etc.

However I cant find in the parted man file how to add a new label to my new /group partition

ie my fstab on the test system has
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2

and I need to mount my new partition as
/dev/hda4 /groups ext3 defaults 1 3

How can I add a label to /dev/hda4 so I can mount it in fstab the same way as / and /home.

I also used tune2fs -j /dev/hda4 to convert the ext2 partition to ext3 after I created it new as ext2. This has also worked a treat.

thanks heaps for the help.