How to increase partition size...

[garthr]

Hi,

I've run out of space on my main linux partition, how do I increase its size? I have an empty unused partition of about 300MB or so. Can I format this (and how) as a linux extended partition and mount it on / ?

Am I heading in the right direction?

Thanks!

[camelrider]

If it's the last partition on the disk, it might be easy with GNUparted (search www.freshmeat.net). (http://www.freshmeat.net).) If it's not the last one it is still possible to stretch it but it's a bit mor complicated. I haven't used it for this but they have pretty complete documentation.
Or, Partition Magic is out there, but not free. I understand their later versions deal with ex@fs pretty well.

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We'll get thisright yet!

[demian]

You can use the extended partition. just do a mke2fs /dev/sdxx is case it's SCSI or replace s with h. The disk mustn't be mounted for this to work. You can copy stuff over (retaining permission, ownerships ond stuff) with tar cSpf - <source_dir> | (cd <target_dir> ; tar xvSpf -). Change fstab accordingly and voila.

If you don't want this to happen in the future you should give logical volume manager a shot. It's amazingly simple once you got the concept. And you can easily expand and shrink filesystem sizes without even rebooting the system.
Here's the LVM home page (http://www.sistina.com/lvm/)