Increasing my linux partition
 

I currently have partitons as follows:

/dev/hda1 (ext3)
/dev/hda2 (ext3) (boot)
/dev/hda3 (estended)
/dev/hda5 (linux-swap)


I only have 20 gigs on my boot partition where linux (distro is ubuntu) installed.. i want to take the remaining 220 gigs i have on my hda1 partiton onto my boot partition but i don't know how.


ANy help is greatly appreciated

If you want to keep the contents of your partitions, you'll need a partition resizer program - "partition magic" is a pretty popular commercial option, or gnu's "parted" (free software) may be able to help.

If you don't mind deleting the partitions and starting over, boot on a rescue or knoppix CD and run (as root) "cfdisk /dev/hda", and do all your partition destruction there.

cfdisk is the most failsafe option- that is, if you don't mind starting again.

otherwise, http://freshmeat.net should be useful- parted or qtparted are good. (gui tools)

titanium_geek

What puzzles me is your reference to the "/boot partition." I am uncertain why you would want 220 gigabytes in that partition.

/boot is normally the smallest partition, because all that it needs to have is enough space for grub and a couple of kernel-images (the one you're using, the one you just built, and maybe the one before that) and their related files.

Personally, I've grown rather fond of having multiple partitions ... ones that are "entirely separate in every way" from the root partition and its contents. Great places (hint, hint...) to put backups of everything important. Stuff like the contents of /home, /etc/, /lib. :)

If I were you, finding myself with 220 gigabytes of storage just a'burnin' a hole in my pocket, I'd keep it as a separate partition. Maybe two. Three. I might even hold some space purely in-reserve.

Download the Rescue CD iso from http://freshmeat.net/projects/systemrescuecd/ and it has the tools needed to resize partitions. Alot smaller than knoppix Live CD. You just have to move each partition after the /dev/hda1 to the end and then can increase /dev/hda1. Only issue with a new user to knoppix and qtparted is when knoppix is started it mounts the harddrive partitions and they need to be unmounted before using qtparted.

Brian1