wrc1944 Posted July 4, 2003 Report Share Posted July 4, 2003 Here's a copy of a post I made over at pclinuxonline, requesting new MDK rpms for Parted, and QTparted. Maybe someone here can offer some insight? Thanks, wrc1944 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ranger, Maybe I'm dense, but with DiskDrake I can't seem to find a way to move the location of a partition on the hard disk like you can with Partition Magic. As an example, on one test box, I'd like to delete two partions at the end of one hard disk, and then slide my /home partition to the end, leaving free space in front of the /home partition, and after the remaing MDK partitions. My objective is to then delete the remaining MDK partitions, and try installing Gentoo towards the front of the drive, retaining my /home (from MDK). If that fails, I then reinstall MDK. After reading the Gentoo install docs and reading their forum many times, it just seems safer to have all the free space to create the Gentoo partitions at the front of the drive instead of trying to create them with the old MDK /home right in the middle. This drive is only 9GB and almost full, so I don't want to try dual booting on it, as my 3GB /home has gotten almost full. There is no cd burner on this box to make a full /home backup with. Another question: How can DiskDrake, or for that matter Parted, safely resize a partition without loosing data, since your don't defrag linux partitions to consolidate all the data at the front of a partition? If you don't defrag, and after deleting and writing data to /home for a year, it would seem like the data could be anywhere on the disk- or am I still thinking in terms of windows file systems? All these operations would be easy with Partition Magic in windows. If there are ways to do this with DiskDrake, I'd sure like to be enlightened. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulSe Posted July 5, 2003 Report Share Posted July 5, 2003 I'll try and answer as well as I can with what I understand: I'm pretty sure that Diskdrake will not be able to perform the task you are looking for. The primary reason is because of the nature of Linux file systems. Because linux generally uses journalised filesystems (such as reiserfs), they do not like being resized or moved. This is a small sacrifice to make for the advantages of journalising. Firstly, security is better. FAT32 partitions can be manipulated in many ways, but they are very insecure. Secondly, as you said, we do not defragment in Linux. This, of course, is also unecessary with NTFS partitions in Windows. The very nature of a journalised partition means that fragmentation will not happen. Your suggested partition layout looks good, but I think the only way you are going to achieve it is by backing everything up and bombing your current partitions so you can set them up in the desired way from scratch. Once again, I am answering your post according to my understanding, I might be wrong on a few points, but some of the more knowledgable members will correct me or confirm what I said shortly :wink: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wrc1944 Posted July 5, 2003 Author Report Share Posted July 5, 2003 SoulSe Well, that's what happened- I finally wiped the drive. After I bzip2'd /home, Mail, and Documents in separate bz2 files, and put them safely in my little 1.5GB /usr/local partition, I felt brave enough to attempt reformatting home, and reinstalling. Big mistake. Everything went OK up until I tried finishing up the reformatting of /home. The MBR and superblocks had changed somehow, and I couldn't get out of it or make progress in DiskDrake (even though I know it very well). It wouldn't go into the final partitioning stage, because it couldn't read /home- it had changed to HOME. I then tried the rescue cd- messed around with it some and finally went to console vim, looked around some, and then tried to restore from usr/local using MDK's little tar script which I had used to bzip2, but since the tables had been rewritten and apparently weren't being recognized by tar xvfj, my fstab was fouled up, and I was really stuck. I then put the drive in another box (that has a burner) as slave, and tried to access the partitions from my main MDK install- still no go. Couldn't mount any partition on the slave, although they were all formatted. Then I decided to reinstall MDK and wipe everything except /usr/local with a minimum install. That worked, and I was able to mount /usr/local on the 9GB drive from the big drive's installation, and burn the bz2's to cd. Whew! What a learning experience. I'm now slating this 9GB drive for Gentoo only, just to see if I can figure that out- then maybe copy all the Mail and Documents back into the Gentoo install (if I get that far). Thanks for the help, wrc1944 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulSe Posted July 6, 2003 Report Share Posted July 6, 2003 :shock: What a mission! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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