disk partitions. adding/resizing.

[mikeoneil]

Hi,

I installed mandrake 9.0 some weeks ago onto a new computer and accepted all the defaults during installation. This left me with / = 3.5Gb, /swap = 256Mb and /home = 76Gb. I have since reduced /home in size and added a /media to keep photos etc. What I would like to do now is create seperate (much larger) new partitions for /usr and /var.

 

Diskdrake does not allow me to simply increase the size of / presumably because it is immediately followed by the other partitions. I've done searches on this forum and others but not really found what I'm looking for. I saw a post that suggested that a new partition with the same name as an existing directory will automatically copy all data over.??

 

How can I safely create these two new partitions? I can leave / as 3.5Gb and have 20 Gb at the end of the disk currently unused for anything. In fact, is it posible at all? I'd also like to double the size of /swap. I have only Mandrake 9.0 on this machine and the disk is an IBM 80Gb with 256Mb RAM.

 

 

I'll just note that when I resized /home and created /media with diskdrake I was asked to reboot which I did. I then got a 'superblock' error and a refusal to boot futher. Not really knowing what to do, I was able to launch diskdrake from the console mode as su and repeat what I had already done from X/KDE.

 

Thanks for any advice..

Mike

[Cannonfodder]

The easist way to is to simply do it over. Backup any files and note what software you have installed.

 

You can also try messing with ranish partition mananger although I don't have personal experience with it, its often mentioned as a good partitioning tool.

 

Last of all you can try using partimage to backup partitions to Cd and recreate them in their new size. However, you can't restore to a smaller partition so you may need a temp partition that allows you to restore and then copy the files to the destination (only if its smaller).