Thread: Partition resizing and Ubuntu

Yup I just copied my home directory to the external HD, and backed up some key files from the root that I care about (sources.list, etc.) so no worries there

boot into a liveCD
ensure that neither your root or home partitions are mounted
fire up gparted (or qtparted, depending on desktop environment)
resize to suit

always a good idea to backup your system before hand

*edit*
to answer a few of the other queries

Originally Posted by Replicon

I keep reading online that if you're resizing a windows partition, you absolutely must defrag it before. Is that true of ext3 as well, or am I safe just going for it? Also, I am finding online that there is no real way to defrag ext3 filesystems (short of temporarily converting to ext2). I imagine it's sophisticated enough to make fragmentation a mostly negligible issue.

There is actually no way of defragging an ext3 partition
you just can't do it

under normal use, ext3 does not fragment
ext3 does start fragmenting under special use cases
- after you exceed ~95% disk usage (but at this stage, a little fragmentation is the least of your worries - you have no space left)
- if you're writing large files (greater than 4Gb) that change constantly in size
(Eg. a time-shifting media centre, or a very high traffic database with lots of inserts)

Don't convert ext3 to ext2
you will lose a lot of meta-data attached to files
converting to ext2 should only be done when recovering data from a damaged disk

nice little explanation of fragmentation
http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/ind..._defragmenting

sweeet. I'll try it first thing in the morning!

Ack!

So I did it. It all looked like it worked out fine, but now, all I get is a GRUB flashing cursor. I imagine the resize might have moved the grub configuration out of the boot sector or something. I'll start googling, but if anyone knows the incantation to have this fixed, please post it

ah, this worked:

Code:

(from grub prompt)

find /boot/grub/stage1

<<<said (hd0,0)>>>

root (hd0,0)

setup (hd0)

quit

Hopefully it sticks

Note that "df -h" treats 1G as 2^30 (i.e. 1024^3) bytes, whereas fdisk treats 1GB as 10^9 (i.e. 1000^3) bytes. Likewise, "df -h" treats 1M as 2^20 bytes and fdisk treats 1MB as 10^6 bytes. I create my partitions with GNU parted using the "unit GiB" option, so that my numbers are consistent.