balug-moen_hints_on_partitioning

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To: balug-talk@balug.org
From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>
Subject: Re: [Balug-talk] resize partition without losing
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 00:40:35 -0800

Quoting Paul Larkin (larkin@jps.net):

> Hi, is it possible to resize a Linux native (ext3) partition without
> losing data?  

Complete list (I think) of all your candidate tools is included in
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/#partition

> I'm taking a class in beginning Linux sysadmin, but made a partition
> sizing mistake (partition was spozed to be 2G, I just let the CD "use
> the available space" & now I need that space for other things.  It
> holds /usr.  Teacher sez I need to re-install, which I presume means
> completely reformatting the drive.

Frankly, why not?  I doubt you have much invested into the
existing /usr partition.  So, blow it away and re-do it.
You'll probably learn a few things that you missed the first
time, because there was too much going on.

And this time, if you have the space to spare, you might
want to leave space for a 100 MB maintenance partition.  (I
create such a thing on boxes I build, and put a second,
minimal installation there.)  And leave some space
unallocated, so that later, if necessary, you can put a
partition or two there as holding space for files, while you
delete and rebuild filesystems, e.g., because you wanted to
adjust their sizes.

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