eroica Posted July 13, 2004 Report Share Posted July 13, 2004 hello, I am running out of room on my root partion and would like to take some space from my windows d: partition. My hard drive is setup as follows: [root@localhost cot]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda6 1.5G 1.4G 102M 93% / /dev/hda8 788M 212M 576M 27% /home /dev/hda1 2.0G 1.3G 748M 64% /mnt/win_c /dev/hda5 730M 279M 451M 39% /mnt/win_d I've booted into MandrakeMove and shrunk win_d partition and tried to then reuse space in / but when I bring up the / partition the size button is already maxxed out. Is there anyway to get more room on my / besides paying for something like Partition Magic? alan [formatted by spinynorman] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xbob Posted July 13, 2004 Report Share Posted July 13, 2004 Most of what's eating your space is in /usr (most likely), but I doubt you can make enough room to effectively move it. How big is your /usr directory? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted July 13, 2004 Report Share Posted July 13, 2004 (edited) /usr is probably 90% of your / you'll have to move big stuff in /usr, like themes, icons, backgrounds, whatever is big, to /home and /mnt/win_d and use symlinks in /usr to point to them. So for example, mv -f /usr/share/themes /home ln -s /home/themes /usr/share/themes not pretty, but it works to be on the safe side, leave /usr/lib!!!! If it'll fit move all of share mv -f /usr/share /home ln -s /home/share /usr/share/ Edited July 13, 2004 by bvc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest permittivity2 Posted July 13, 2004 Report Share Posted July 13, 2004 I agree with bvc about the symlinks. However, I completely suggest purchasing another hard drive. Even the smallest hard drive at Best Buy would be plenty of room. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xbob Posted July 13, 2004 Report Share Posted July 13, 2004 (edited) Also agree, I'm not fond of the linking on the windows partiton, so I think investing in even a small hard drive is a smart move, you can pick up 40 gigs for about $50 at Newegg if you are in the U.S. And listen to bvc, he has been a big help to me on some obscure stuff, he knows the 'Drake. Edited July 13, 2004 by xbob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SwiftDeath Posted July 13, 2004 Report Share Posted July 13, 2004 Be vary carefull, if you read my partition modifyer post, I made a very big mistake and deleted all of my harddrive. But in the end it turned out for the better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobF Posted July 13, 2004 Report Share Posted July 13, 2004 (edited) You seem to have plenty of options. 1. Do as bvc says. 2. Get yourself another hard disk and set it up as hdb. They sell for about US$1/GB. 3. Repartition your Mandrake partitions. Re 3: You don't have to put out money for Partition Magic. There is a free PM clone available that runs under Linux. It's called QTParted, and I believe there is an mdk.rpm available of the most recent version, v. 0.4.4. Better still, you could download the ISO (about 100 MB) for SystemRescueCD v. 0.2.14 and burn it to CD-R or CD-RW. Even an 8 cm mini-CD will hold it, and you won't regret having that useful CD. It's a bootable live CD which includes QTParted v.0.4.4 along with a ton of other useful programs. You can boot from that CD (provided your BIOS is set to enable booting from CD ahead of booting from HDD), and type run_qtparted from the root prompt. If run from that live CD, QTParted will allow you to manipulate your partitions and write the changes to disk without mounting the partitions (you shouldn't write changes of partitions to disk while they are mounted; that may be a problem if you install and run QTParted from within Mandrake because Mandrake, I believe, mounts most partitions by default). You first would have to back up your current Mandrake system (e.g. to CD; it may be sufficient to backup your /home folder if you haven't installed many new programs in / beyond what you got from the distro CD's). Then, using QTparted, DELETE the Mandrake / and /home partitions. You could leave the swap partition untouched (if you have one), or you could also delete it if you want to change its size. The free space that you created when you resized your hda5 (win_d) partition with the MandrakeMove partition manager (if in fact that took hold) should also show up at this point. Using all the freed up space, then CREATE two (or three) new partitions for MDK / and /home (and swap, resp.), with different size allocations than what you had before (e.g. 1.8 or 2 GB for /, 125 MB for swap, the rest for /home). Choose ext3 as the filesystem format for / and /home. You can experiment with QTParted and manipulate partitions at will - nothing will be written to disk right away, and you can always UNDO your changes. Take notes of how you laid out the new partitions, and when you're happy with your handiwork, COMMIT the changes. That will write the new partition info to the partition table on disk (and you'll lose all your data in the changed partitions). Then reinstall Mandrake in the new partitions, using a custom (or expert) install. If it gets to be too hairy in terms of all the detailed stuff that the MDK installer wants to know about partitions, their names, mount points, size, beginning and end, etc., you can always abandon the install at this point. As another option, you could then delete all the new Mandrake partitions that you'd made and just leave free space on hda, and during the new install go with the option of "use all free space" and have Mandrake allocate it to partitions according to its own choice. But who knows, you may then wind up with something similar to what you had before, i.e. inadequate space for /. This repartitioning procedure may appear cumbersome but it's likely to work. There may be a way of resizing your / (i.e. letting it grow at the upper, right end) if you have free space available (you should because you shrunk your hda5 (win_d) partition). Or perhaps you can take some space from /home by shrinking it from the right end (that may require first defragmenting that partition). Anyway, QTParted should give you a clear idea of the layout of your disk space and should be able to let you know what can and what cannot be done, nondestructively (i.e. before COMMITing the changes). It's also possible that additional trickery can be done from the command line - I'm not a Linux guru. Once Mandrake is reinstalled, move your saved home folder (e.g. /home/eroica, or whatever you call it) back into the proper location. Make sure the ownership, group membership and access permissions on your /home/eroica folder are correct. They should be something like this (do ls -l /home/eroica) drwxr-xr-x 79 eroica eroica 4096 Jul 13 15:47 eroica/ not drwxr-xr-x 79 root root 4096 Jul 13 15:47 eroica/ If they are anything other than eroica & eroica (which would lead to KDE getting stuck on bootup) then do, as root chown -R eroica.eroica /home/eroica Having written all this, I would actually go with recommendation #2, if I were you. Get yourself a second hard disk of 40 GB or more from Seagate, WD or Maxtor; it won't cost you more than US$50. You're really cramped for space. Robert P.S. Yes, be careful. The one thing that would make me feel a little uncomfortable is the fact that your Mandrake resides on the same disk as the Windows XP boot partition. Not a few people have reported that Windows (XP?) can at times be a little temperamental when it comes to attempts to resize its ntfs partitions, and/or installing or modifying Linux on a shared disk. That's just a note of caution - it may overstate the likelihood of trouble. Edited July 13, 2004 by RobF Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eroica Posted July 14, 2004 Author Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 thanx for the many replys. It would seem a second hard disk would be best. The only thing was being a newbie to linux it took a long while to get sound,winmodem etc hardware working on my machine. Now in one fell swoop everbody says start from scratch. That's whats holding me back. If I use QTParted to resize win_d and / would that be non-destructive? alan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted July 14, 2004 Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 (edited) playing with the partition table and having xp is ALWAYS risky....ALWAYS!!! ....even with Partition Magic 8. I've lost all. Be sure to back EVERYTHING up. That's all you can do. Edited July 14, 2004 by bvc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobF Posted July 15, 2004 Report Share Posted July 15, 2004 Alan wrote: < If I use QTParted to resize win_d and / would that be non-destructive? First find out whether you in fact have space available in win_d that can be freed up. In Windows XP, go to My Computer, right click on Local Disk (D:), then Properties > Tools > Defragment Now > Analysis. That will give you a graphical display of the state of fragmentation of that partition. If there is a block of "unmovable files" (color-coded green) near the upper (right) end of the partition, then you're out of luck. E.g. my bootable Windows XP partition (C: or win_c) is less than half full but Windows has placed a block of unmovable files close to its upper end. As a result, under QTParted this partition shows up as 97% full and in practice cannot be resized. If there isn't such a block in your D: partition, then you should defragment that partition and then analyze again how much contiguous free space exists at the upper end now. Theoretically, that space can be shrunk nondestructively (but leave some space for Windows), and the freed up space can then be made available to the / partition of Mandrake. But I'm not sure whether that can be done simply by grafting that space onto the upper end of the MDK / partition, and whether it can be done without destroying the data in that partition. What can be done is to delete the / partition (which destroys all data in it), and then using its space combined with the space gained from resizing the Windows partition to create a new larger / partition (and then reinstalling MDK, after you've also backed up the /home partition). You really have to take a look at the layout of the partitions on your disk and experiment with simulating the repartitioning without writing the changes to the partition table on disk. That can be done with QTParted. If you can't easily get QTParted, you could - under Windows XP - download and run Acronis PartitionExpert 2003. That's a good partition manager which is sold as part of a package of disk utilities called Acronis Disk Director Suite ($50). Acronis has made available for free a disabled demo of PartitionExpert which has all the functionality of the full program except that you cannot write the changes to disk, i.e. you merely simulate the repartitioning in memory but you can't actually do anything to your disk. That makes it completely safe to run as an analysis tool. You could run through the procedures that I suggested above and in my earlier post. Then once you know what can be done on your disk, you could use QTParted to actually do it. You can also learn a lot about disk partitioning from the free 80-page User's Guide to PartitionExpert which you can download from the Acronis website. http://www.acronis.com/products/partitionexpert/ If you have questions about QTParted, you can go to its user forum http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/forums/ You could also get yourself a second hard disk for less change than most commercial partitioning software and install Xandros OCE on it which is available for free. In my judgment, that may be the best route for folks who have freshly arrived from the Windows camp to get acquainted with Linux. I think Xandros is as good as Mandrake but it's more user-friendly and much more resembles Windows XP. The free OCE is the full-fledged Standard Edition (which sells for $40) except that the CD burning program has been limited in its capability (4x max burn speed; you can get around that by installing K3b). I bet you'd like Xandros. Their hardware recognition is excellent and the installation very easy. They also have an excellent user support forum. From Xandros you could copy your user data from the MDK /home over to Xandros /home. The Xandros lilo bootloader would replace Mandrake's, and from it you could then optionally boot into Windows XP, Mandrake or Xandros. That way you could test drive two different versions of Linux and utilize their respective virtues at your choice. I use Xandros as my default Linux system and from its boot menu I can choose to boot into Windows XP or any of five different Linux distributions (including MDK 10.0). I've used QTParted repeatedly to carve up and rearrange the space on my two hard disks, to set up a total of 11 partitions for 4 different filesystems (FAT32, ntfs, ext3 and reiserfs) used by those 6 different OS's. I haven't lost any data in the process. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted July 15, 2004 Report Share Posted July 15, 2004 If your worried about your time spent on mopdems etc. its a bit catch-22 you could put in new disk... copy stuff over and retain everything but it will be a bit of work... you could use partimage to back up each partition and then restore it on the new disk which in your case is preently just / and /home. You havent got loads a space in total which is why were saying extra HDD.. Partition magic (real) is very good. The only reliable way to move XP partitions is with native tools but I havent heard of problems with qtparted yet!!! nor have I looked.... remember even user error is destructive when your doing this sorta thing! so make sure you do backup.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SwiftDeath Posted July 15, 2004 Report Share Posted July 15, 2004 Hey Robf, Have you ever tried Lycoris, Linspire, or Libranet? I dled Xandros and tried it out, and I agree it was easy, but I need something more complex. I also dled Lycoris and Linspire. I am trying to find the easiest distro for my family. Oh yeah, best of wishes with your problems and try not to delete your whole entire hard drive, SwiftDeath Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobF Posted July 15, 2004 Report Share Posted July 15, 2004 Hey Robf, Have you ever tried Lycoris, Linspire, or Libranet? This is getting off topic, but Lycoris: No Linspire: Yes, tested their live CD, don't like their marketing hype, worse than MS Libranet 2.8.1: very nice, I'll be spending a lot of time with it I must say that whenever I get fed up with the endless fiddling that most Linux distros seem to require, I fire up Xandros, enjoy its nice looks and reliable touring performance and actually get something done. The other distros I'm currently running are Mandrake 10.0, Libranet 2.8.1, Mepis 2004-b05, and Yoper V2. Xandros 2.0: Honda Accord (nice car) Mandrake 10.0: BMW Libranet 2.8.1: Volvo or 4WD pickup truck Mepis: Corvette Yoper: Jaguar? Hard to decide between them. And then there are Knoppix, PCLinuxOS, Kanotix, SAM, DSL, Puppy, etc. etc. Aren't we lucky to have these choices? By comparison, living as an unwitting slave to MS (and, more seriously, risking your ID and money in the process) is like living in a dungeon. Robert Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eroica Posted July 15, 2004 Author Report Share Posted July 15, 2004 ok i downloaded SystemRescueCD v. 0.2.14 iso and burned to CD. Tried booting to it. I get an "init not found" error message w/suggestion to try "init=" command at bootup prompt. I wish I knew what init= should be. Is my ISO image corrupt? What is init value suppose to be? SO many ?'s so little time.Anyhow does anybody have suggestions... thanx alan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobF Posted July 16, 2004 Report Share Posted July 16, 2004 init is the program that the kernel starts after the kernel has been loaded from disk into memory and after it has initialized the devices and drivers and mounted the root filesystem. init then takes care of the rest of the boot sequence. You know you've gotten to init when you see the gentoo linux mascot (for SysResCD), or in Mandrake when you see the blue "Welcome to Mandrakelinux" message. How far did you get trying to boot the CD? It could be that your ISO has been corrupted or that the CD wasn't written properly. Did you run md5sum <name of System Rescue CD ISO> and check it against the published checksum? Did you burn it to CD as an ISO image? If all that is OK, you may want to burn another CD, perhaps at slower speed, and with no other program running. There is a SysResCD manual on the CD as well as on their website. Looking through it quickly, I didn't see anything in it on init options. They also have a user forum at http://www.sysresccd.org/forums/ If you have a broadband connection, you could download the ISO for the Knoppix v. 3.4 live CD (700 MB) which also contains QTParted 0.4.4. I didn't mention that because I don't believe you have enough space on your HDD to handle such a large ISO. But perhaps a friend or someone at work can burn it for you. But, really, I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to get a working CD of SysResCD - lots of people use it without a problem. Robert Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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