partitioning and resizing from Red Hat
 

I have Red Hat 9 installed and running fine. I would like to make my system dual boot with Monta Vista. I want to use fdisk when Red Hat comes up. But when I issue a command to resize the hda3 partition I get a message that it can not resize a mounted partition.

/sbin/resize2fs -f /dev/hda3 7324216

How can I boot Red Hat to a point where it does not mount the /dev/hda3 to / so that I can resize and then install.

At what stage during booting of redhat I can stop it and how so that I can log in and enter this command and or fdisk

please help, any suggestion will be appreciated.

Thanks

Zenj

What do you have mounted on hda3?

Here is the result of df command

Filesystem Mounted on
/dev/hda3 /

Do it from RHL9 rescue mode using the first installation CD (boot: linux rescue), but don’t search for/mount the filesystem.

So you have root mounted. If you aren't too familiar with linux, I would suggest using a live cd with qtparted or something. There is a way to do it without a livecd, but you might want to hold off on doing it like that. You could of course google. :)

I have actually done this before. I used Partition magic then. I didn't use the bloated windows version, though. If you look in a Partition Magic directory, there is a DOS-text based version that will allow you to resize your partitions without losing anything. Sorry, I forgot the filename. Procedure: Make a bootable dos floppy disk. Copy partition magic files to disk. Start Partition Magic from floppy and resize. Guess the winversion will work fine also.

IMPORTANT: Also, on dual-boot systems, Redhat won't start if it is not at the begining of you hard drive. Partition thusly:

"/boot" is your 1st Partition about 80MB It will point to the Linux Install.
"/mnt/windows" second partition containing windows
"/swap" is your swap partition I use a 1000MB size
"/" is the root of your linux installation remainder of hdd space
*** No quotes, of course

Set up your partitions like this an you will be fine.
**It would probably be easier to back up important data files and start clean. Good chance to corrupt your master boot record.

IF YOU CORRUPT Your MBR, get a bootable DOS diskette, with fdisk.exe on it, boot using the floppy, and type "fdisk /mbr" (no quotes) This will fix your MBR and you can start over.

Good Luck!

Thanks folks, I used the Red Hat Boot CD and went to rescue mode without searching for linux install. Thank did it.