LinuxQuestions.org - partitioning a mounted drive or from a boot DVD

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partitioning a mounted drive or from a boot DVD

Hello,

I wonder if there is a way to partition a mounted drive or to partition a hard drive when booting from a Linux-distro installation DVD.

I run SuSE 9.3 on an intel PC. There is no other OS on my PC but this one.

fdisk tells me:

Code:

Command (m for help): p



Disk /dev/hda: 82.3 GB, 82348277760 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 10011 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes



  Device Boot      Start        End      Blocks  Id  System

/dev/hda1              1        113      907641  82  Linux swap / Solaris

/dev/hda2  *        114      10010    79497652+  83  Linux

I also have the original DVD of SuSE Linux Pro 9.3 that I can use if needed. I have tried to look a bit around what I could do when I boot from the DVD, but I could not find anything interesting.

Your hints will highly be apperciated. Best regards,

Benjamin

I don´t know if you can partition a mounted drive. The best thing to do IMHO is boot from a live/rescue cd and use fdisk of cfdisk to repartition it. You will loose all the data on that drive though.

Good luck

Hmm. Thank you. But I would like not to loose my data. Is there no way to partition a disk without loosing the data on it?

Use something like partimage to backup the partition. Do your partitioning and then restore the image to your new partition.

Quote:

http://www.partimage.org/

I believe QTParted allows resizing without data loss. As a general rule, you can't redefine partitions belonging to the system you're using.
You will need it unmounted, but it should work from Knoppix, for instance.

So, if I understand it well, it is impossible to partition a mounted drive. Which means that, on a "normal" PC, with only one HD, I _have_ to use something like a live CD (knoppix, for example).
Am I correct?

Now what if I had a partitioned HD?

I am asking because I will probably re-install my system from scratch, this time making a partition at install-time, using YaST. After having googled a lot and searched on these forums, the partition I am planing to do is the following one. Your comments about this partition-scheme are most welcome.

Let's say I have a 80 GB Hard Drive that is partitionned this way:
512 MB for Swap
5 GB for the / folder
5 GB for the /usr folder
7 GB for the /tmp folder (I think it is necessary if I want to burn DVDs, which I want to. Am I correct?)
40 GB for /home

So I would have about 22 GB unused disk-space.

Will I be able to use this disk-space later? Will I be able to increase the size of one of my existing partitions? Or will I be able to create a new partition on it? If yes, how? Will the solution be to boot from a live-CD and to do any operation using fdisk or QTParted or something alike? And that would be possible without data loss?