How to shrink a partition of a Linux VMWare guest?
 

VMWare tools allows me to shrink the "disk" for a Windows guest. vmware-toolbox presents me with the option to "Select the partitions you wish to shrink." on a Linux guest. However, there are no partitions shown to be selected. Anyone had success doing this?

TIA,

Ken

:doh: I hate it when I answer my own question - a little investigation tells me that this will not work on a journaling file system. I guess I had best create future Linux VMs with ext2 - what a pain.

Ken

Not using vmware-tools but booting a Linux guest from an ISO containing (g)parted hasn't posed any partition or file system resizing problems for me yet.

Thanks unSpawn. I booted my Ubuntu 10.04 VM from a like live CD on one monitor while reading the pared docs on the other. I invoked parted and - bottom line - the VM is ext4 and it appears that parted does not support ext4 nor ext3. Pray tell what trick do you use (or do you not have ext4 or ext3 partitions in your VMs?)

Ken

Uh. Sorry. ext3 needs resize2fs. I just use the Gparted Live CD. Haven't touched ext4 yet but apparently resize2fs speaks ext4 as well.

That's what I thought - the error message told me to go pound sand and use resize2fs. I have 5 TB on my newly rebuilt server to backup VMs and other stuff so I don't really NEED to shrink - just thought I would explore the methodology. I will give resize2fs a try after I re-inflate my Ubuntu VM (I just erased it and replaced it with a backup copy from the server after parted didn't).

Ken