Resizing existing partitions

Hi there,

I am a newbie with Open SuSE (KDE 3.5.1) installed on a compaq presario laptop with 40 GB HDD.

My HDD has 3 (4) partitions-
CNTFS) - 20GB Windows Primary
DNTFS) - 11GB Windows (Data)
Swap (?) - 400MB
root - 5.5 GB (Open SuSE) (ReiserFS)

Initially my system had only 2 partitions viz. C: & D: (20 GB & 16 GB respectively). When I installed Open SuSE it automatically resized the second partition as above. Now I seem to have fallen in love with Open SuSE and my problem is that My root partition is nearly full (4.6 out of 5.5 GB). As I have spent countless hours customizing my SuSE installation I dont want to reformat my system (Not to mention backing up the whole data).

So I was wondering if SuSE could resize D: before, cant it do so now? and add the space saved to my root (Linux) partition. My D: drive has some empty space (in any case I'm willing to empty it further by copy whatever data it contains onto a portable USB HDD.

Also I upgraded my RAM from 256 MB to 768MB. Do I have to resize my swap partition and if I do then How do I go about it?

Well can somebody help me out by giving step by step instructions as to how to go about it.

P.S. I've seen the partitioning option somewhere in the control center but I'm trying very hard not to do something stupid .

Thx in advance
Rex
rahilrai@gmail.com

1. To check, if the swap space is sufficient: use top on console and check the free swap space (should not be fully used)
2. I can not recommend resizing an existing reiserfs partition.
3. To check, where most of the disk space is used, use the following commands on console: cd / and du.

Unfortunately you cannot extend a partition on its upper end. So if your partition table has the root partition behind D:, there is no way to move this space.

The only option I see in your case is to shrink D and create a new Linux partition on which you can mount part of the tree (e.g. /home).

I haven't done it often, so I can't give advice on the NTFS-resize operation. Make sure the drive is completely free of fragments at its lower end (run defrag repeatedly, if not).