increasing partition size

Don Powell · 06-22-2005, 08:12 PM

My company has a Red Hat webserver but the consultant who created it bailed on us a couple of years ago. Last week, we were unable to make changes to our website (it uses Zope). In looking at the partitions we saw that the main partition was 98% full. In an attempt to gain space we used Ghost 2003 and ghosted to an identical drive but decreased the size of an unused partition (/user) and made the main partition larger. After rebooting to the other drive Linux appears to come up fine, all partitions mounted and we can see the size changes refelected there. However, the drive just sits there with the hard drive light churning away and our website never comes up.

If we wait long enough will Linux finish whatever it's doing? Our ISP tells us that Linux uses "magic pointers" and that we can't just change partition sizes this way. Is that correct and, if so, is there a way to change partitions without reinstalling from scratch?

crabboy · 06-22-2005, 08:32 PM

Any partitioning sofware that you use would also have to know the filesystem type and shrink that accordingly. If Ghost2003 just shrank the partition and left the filesystem untouched you will have problems.

What filesystem do you use?

The procedures for shrinking a partition with a reiser filesystem on it woulid be:
use resize_reiserfs to shring the filesystem.
Use a partition tool to shrink the paritiion to the same size as the filesystem.

Also take a look at the 'parted' command if you have it installed. It can resize paritions and filesystems for you.

I avoid these problem by using the lvm. (logical volume manager)

Don Powell · 06-23-2005, 05:24 AM

Is the Logical Volume Manager a builtin utility?

Sorry, I'm obviously a newbie

crabboy · 06-23-2005, 09:14 AM

It depends on your distro and version. Try running the programs: 'pvdisplay' or 'vgdisplay'. If they are installed then you've likely also have kernel support for it as well.

Here is a link to the LVM howto:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/index.html

Keep in mind that while the LVM makes disk partition admin very easy, it can be a headache to restore data from a failed disk or swapping disks between machines.