[ale] Oops - Want to rearrange two partitions

[Jim Popovitch]

On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 12:46 -0500, John Mills wrote:
> ALErs -
> 
> I just installed SuSE-10.1 and set up a 1GB partition for /var. From the
> first login I see that /var is about 35% full, which seems much too close
> for comfort down the road.
> 
> My reason for fixing size of /var was to ensure that it not grow and lock
> the file system.
> 
> The next-lower partition is /home at /dev/hdb7, with 10GB. 
> The next-higher partition is /opt at /dev/hdb9, with 10GB. 
> 
> I would like to give up 1GB of /home or /var and add it to /var at
> /dev/hdb8. (All three are logical partitions within the same extended
> partition.)
> 
> If this was all a bad idea in the first place, I guess I could move /var 
> into one of the other partitions, but then I will want to recover its 
> space to a neighboring partition.
> 
> How might I resize partitions to move an extra GB from into /var without 
> trashing my installation, else move it and recover its space?


Copy the contents of /home or /opt to some temp place.  Also, I would
recommend backing up the contents of /var too, use a tar file or copy it
to another location using something like "cp
-rp /var /root/var-backup" .   Note: to change the partition size
of /dev/hdb7 you will need to be logged in directly as root, not
su'ed.  

Next you have two options, the first is to use parted to
shrink /dev/hdb7 or htd9 and then again to grow /dev/hdb8.

Alternatively you could use fdisk or cfdisk to actually re-edit the
partition table...but the side affect of doing this is that you then
need to re-format the modified partitions.

What is your experience level with all of the above tasks?  If you feel
comfortable with fdisk, I would recommend that path as it is easier
(IMHO).

hth,

-Jim P.