Gparted live - safe to use?
 

Hi gang!

Okay, so, I'm running out of root space (sda3, in fact) and need to expand things. I found Gparted Live, and tried it out. So far, I'm delighted...but (yep, here we go again) paranoid as I am, I'd like to double check before letting that loose on my box.

Bottom-line question:


Disk layout

/dev/sda1 Boot
/dev/sda2 Swap
/dev/sda3 Root file system, getting cramped
/dev/sda4 Home partition, with some 145 Gb left over

The plan: shrink sda4 and move it to the "right" ,the outer/read end of the disk, then expand sda3 to take in the ajacent space...

As I mentioned, this works, but ... well, you know...

Thor

Not me - and I dick around with partitions a lot

Note my sigline ...

Duly noted, in fact, I've taken this advice at heart and have made a backup last night...
All that's left to do is to take a deep breath, and jump in the pool where the water is too cold ;)

Thor

There have been a few reports on LQ of gparted doing unexpected things (sorry -- not easy to find them for reference). There have not been any about fdisk or cfdisk. parted (the command line utility behind gparted?) has rarely (ever?) been mentioned on LQ but it is advisedly the one we should all be using now. I prefer cfdisk.

Neiter fdisk nor cfdisk are able to resize partitions, parted is not able to do the necessary file-system modifications, so GParted is the way to go, IMHO.

Whoa - ???? Say what ???.

Tobi, reconsider all that. gparted just builds on libparted. [fc]disk also are more than capable of resizing partitions.

Holy smoke !!!.

Parted lacks the ability to modify filesystems in versions newer than 2.4, this is mentioned in their README in the tar-ball. libparted has, AFAIK, this functionality still implemented.
I also can't find options to shrink a partition in fdisk and cfdisk.

Also, while GParted is based on libparted, it also integrates file-system tools that are use for creating and resizing filesystems.

Well, after six and then some gruelling/nailbiting hours, my filesystem has been shrunk, moved, stretched, verified and updated...

Big tnx to all...


Thor