Advice needed on resizing my Hard drive

[Penguin_newbie]

Hi,
I have an 80 GB drive and have Suse 9.1 installed on it.
However, I was thinking that with all the messing around that I do and seeing as half the time I don't have a clue about what I'm doing, it would be a good idea to resize my HDD so that I could create a new partition ( a data partition) where I couls store that data that I have and maybe back up my HOME directory .

First, is this a viable idea?

Secondly, when i tried to actually do it, I went to the YAST partitioning tool and tried to resize the HDD.However , it said that I couldn't do so cos the drive or filesystem was already mounted and that I had to unmount it in order to resize.

So, my question is how exactly to I do that?

Any help or pointers are greatfully received,

PN

[happybunny]

you cant resize a mounted partition, so if you want to resize the partition / or /boot is on, you have to boot without mounting those...

I would suggest getting a live cd like knoppix, or better, knoppix-std.

Boot to the cd, then resize the partitions.

and having a seperate parition for actual data is a good idea. Just don't format the partition during subsequent installs.

Also, resizing can be destructive, so backup first!

[Penguin_newbie]

Hi happybunny:

I would suggest getting a live cd like knoppix, or better, knoppix-std.

Boot to the cd, then resize the partitions.

Sorry, but what is a live cd like knoppix?
Is this some kind of partitioning tool?

thanks
PN

[happybunny]

a live cd is a bootable cd that has a self contained linux OS on it.

Suse, Mandrake and others produce this so you can test out the distro before buying.

Some people, like the good folks at knoppix, built a distro to be run exclusively on cd only (although you can install on harddrive if you want).

http://www.knoppix.com/ is where you can get this.

They also make one called knoppix-std which has some great tools on it.
http://www.knoppix-std.org/

You can boot to one of these cd's and take care of your partitioning since your harddrive is not mounted or touched at all during the running of these live cd's. And since you cant resize a mounted partition, this seems the only way to do this.

But since you run SUSE, I would download a SUSE live CD since you are more familiar with that distro already.

http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/ftp/live_eval_int.html

But again, this may be destructive so backup first.

and then from any of these live cd's, you could try and resize your harddrive partitions.

[Penguin_newbie]

Hi Happybunny,


thanks very much for explaining that to me.
I understand perfectly.


I'll DL the SUSE cd and resize with that.
My Suse install is quite small so I don't have many valuable files on it so it won't be a total disaster if it all goes pear shaped.Hopefully it won't :)


Cheers
PN

[Penguin_newbie]

Hi again.
Just out of interest, I couldn't use the Suse 9.1 cds to do this could I?

Just wondereing.....:confused:

[happybunny]

i dont' think so since those are install disks.

Its possible there is a repair mode if you boot to disk 1, but I am not to familier with Suse 9.1

[Penguin_newbie]

ok, thanks bunny