Hi there!!!

I've a very messy hardrive and I'm trying to reorganize it using parted. The hard drive in this machine is currently like this:

/dev/hda1 4.7G (fat 32 and win2k on it)
/dev/hda2 19G (fat 32)
/dev/hda3 15G (mounted as / and ext3)
/dev/hda5 38G (mounted as /home and ext3)
none 125M (not mounted, located at /dev/shm)


This is a box of mine, actually, the first one I've tried Linux with and was broken. Now I've fixed it and would like to play with parted to fix its HD (80gigas) as I want and learn it. It's OK if I lose data, the point here is to learn. Windows partitions I can resize with PQ magic, no big, but I don't know how to resize Linux partitions with parted. I'm trying to:

#parted /dev/hda3
(parted) resize 1
(start) 0
(end) 6000

But I cannot use parted while mounted. So... how to unmount a partition?
My goal is to divide my HD like this:

total HD:

to:

The idea is to have a hda1 partition, NTFS for Win2k (about 10 gigas), hda2 (Linux partition, about 10 gigas too and not a /home separated partition), a small one for the swap, the space left (hda3) in Fat32 so both Linux and Windows can write to it (read movies and music stuff..).

I don't need help with everything, just somebody point me out the steps or at least how to start doing so, as unmount a partition. Again, it's not a big problem if I go losing the data in this HD. I want to learn how to resize "safely" Linux partitions and organize my data better. That's why I don't want to format and make it nice and simple . Also, suggestions about how to divide a HD of 80 gigas would be nice. (recommended space for win, linux, data, etc). The above was the best I could think of...

Thanks a lot for any help

P.S: I also have a knoppix disk if it's of any help. This machine has Redhat 9.0 and win2k on it and I understand nothing about cylinders and stuff in the case somebody asks thanks again

You won't be able to unmount the partition mounted on / because it will always be in use. In order to do work on it (resize, etc) you'll have to boot with a floppy or a CD that has its own root.

Maybe your Knoppix CD will be of use, if it has parted on it. You used to be able to download a boot disk from the parted website (www.gnu.org/software/parted/) but they're still not back up since they had that security problem.

Another possible way is to do a minimal Linux install again into the free space you have. /dev/hda3 won't be / in that install, so you'll be free to resize it to your heart's content.

Lyle

Thanks for the reply lyle_s I've thought that I was alone up there for a second . Anyway, I will try to follow your advice. I will boot now with Knoppix and see if it has parted

Thanks again