[CALUG] repartitioning on the fly

[Lee Sheridan]

On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 05:37:18PM -0500, Gregory Davis wrote:

> Actually resizing a partition might prove difficult.  Try Google for "resize 
> ext2" or whatever your format is.  The parted utility seems to be relevant in 
> most cases.  With reiserfs (v3), you used to have to get the partition usage 
> down below the desired size, delete the partition, then reallocate the 
> partition at a smaller size (without formatting it)!  And pray it all worked 
> out!

1.)  Doing that is a bit dangerous if the data is important to a project
that is time-critical.

2.)  Shrinking one filesystem is easy, but the problem is growing the
other one, because you can only append to the filesystem, therefore you
can't use the space that freed up before it.  You MIGHT be able to play
some INSANE 'dd' tricks to move the whole partition back some arbitrary
number of blocks, but I'd only try that for fun.

-- 
Lee Sheridan
lsherida at leebert.org

"I know engineers, they love to change things."  -Dr. McCoy, Star Trek I