Hello everybody,

I have a HD with 4 partitions. Partition 4 is a logical and divided in 4 other partitions.
So I can use 7 partitions.

The problem is that partition 3 is to small. I can resize some of the other partitions, but it seems that Gparted does not allow to move the beginning of the partition.

Since this system has only linux I am looking for some possibility to resize the partition. ( I have already put all my personal files on another partition that is mounted in the file system but that is not enough).

Any hint is welcome.

Thanks

CloudBuilder

can you list your partition scheme like p1 (partition 1) primary 1,000 mb swap
p2 (partition 2) primary 20,000 mb linux
p3 (partition 3) primary 15,000 mb linux
p4 (partition 4) extended 21,000 mb logical
P5 (partition 5) logical 1,000 mb linux
p6 (partition 6) logical 20,000 mb linux
this is how mine looks let me see yours and maybe i can help

try using qtparted.

if you are not using lvm, i have no suggestions. with lvm, there should be no problems.lvm howto is all you need.

Excuse me, I told GTparted it should be QT parted.

With QT parted I can resize, but the starting point of the partition cannot change.

How is it with parted?
Exampel :
Par 3 starts at 52 Gb and ends at 64 GB so it is about 12 GB.
I want to resize it from 12 to 8, this is not the problem, and then move it so it begins at 56GB. So I want to move the beginning at 52GB to 56GB.
Next I can resize the previous par (par2).

Qtparted does not allow to change the beginning, only the end.

CloudBuilder

As far as I'm aware, you can resize a partition by shrinking/growing it by moving the END of the partition. You cannot move the *start* of the partition, once you've set that, it's fixed. Moving it would require moving the whole partition with it.

So, to resize a partition... you can only move the end. Not the beginning.

hello. it's also advisable to defragment the partition first before doing the resize. that's if you want to save the date inside it.

Ok I cannot move the beginning of the P.

What about the following scenario:

I copy the contents of the P to another partition. (this means I have to copy everything that is in the logical one perhaps with DD)

Delete the logical and activate it after leaving som space.
Then I put the other P's back in place and resize P3.
Should be possible I think.
Something I forget ? No problems with Grub ?


Another scenario could be :
Make a new lager partition in the logical.
Copy everything over there.
Then I have to change \etc\fstab and menu.lst in Grub
Seems less time consuming :-) Did I forget something ?

Thanks for your input....

CloudBuilder

Possible (I think), but you'd better be VERY sure you got everything backed up safely.

Wouldn't a better idea be a new hard-drive, and simply a sym-link to a partition on that new drive? It's what I do, works well enough. Certainly less time-consuming and dangerous than fiddling with partitions!

I run into a similar problem when I attempted to dual boot XP and ubuntu. I have a 20G 1st primary partition for XP and the rest is the extended with 2 logical partitions.
I tried and failed lots to shrink this extended one until I found that partition magic (possibly others too) will allow you to change a logical to primary partition. When doing this the logical partition is moved out of the extended, so presto, the extended one shrinks

I only converted the last logical though, so I haven't tried to convert e.g. the first one in the extended set...