Thread: Partition resizing and Ubuntu

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