growing drive space

[Ow Mun Heng]

On Wed, 2004-06-09 at 12:19, James Wilkinson wrote:
> Mark Haney wrote:
> > I am almost certain this has been discussed on here before, but I want  
> > some expert opinion on this.  I have an FC2 box at home that dual boots  
> > XP.  I only use XP for games and I'm running out of space on my FC2 side,  
> > what's the best way to add the extra space to my FC2 install?  I have  
> > partition magic to use for shrinking my XP partition, so that's not going  
> > to be a problem.  Anyone have any preferences?
> 
> How is your hard drive partitioned?
> 
> Assuming it's something like
> hda1    xp
> hda5    /
> hda6    swap
> my preference would be to make either a new /home partition or a new
> /usr partition (depending on how much space you're adding and how full
> those trees are getting). The I'd temporarily mount the new partition
> somewhere, copy everything from the old tree to the new filesystem,
> set up /etc/fstab to mount the new partition in the right place,
> reboot, check that it's working properly, *then* reboot to blow away
> the old file tree.
> 
> Erm... you should be able to delete the old files under /usr or /home
> from single-user mode. You might find it easier to use tomsrtbt, the FC2
> rescue CD, or Knoppix (or similar): that way you're not trying to run a
> system from the same partition that you're modifying.
> 
> You'll still need to have an (empty) /usr or /home directory on your
> root partition: Unix-like systems expect to mount filesystems on
> existing directories.

I had this problem before. And I used partition magic too.

Only caveat I had was that since I was having grub on the linux
partition and not the MBR, I had to re-run rub on the new hda5 (in your
case) and then everything works.

The new space is seen and recognised. No need to backup anything (YMMV).
But I was using ext3 FS. I've switched to XFS and a separate /home
partition once I upgraded my HD from 30Gb->80GB.

Minimal Fuss.

ps: Even with a 80GB, I'm still running out of space. Luckily for me my
"the one who must be obeyed' persuaded me to part with extra $$$ for the
extra 20GB (I was aiming to get a 60GB originally)