Resizing a partition

[Steven Pasternak]

On Thursday 27 January 2005 20:22, Robert Locke wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-01-28 at 10:05 +1100, Lucas Chan wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I recently signed up with a super-cheap dedicated server company to run
> > one of my personal sites.  The box was pre-installed with FC2.
> >
> > Some of the partitions they set up on it are ridiculously small.  I
> > contacted them saying:
> >
> > "I'm quickly running out of space on a couple of partitions and need them
> > to be resized. I understand this needs to be performed at the console
> > with a boot disk so I'm submitting a ticket to you guys."
> >
> > They responded saying:
> >
> > "We cannot resize the partitions without reformatting/reimaging the
> > drive."
> >
> > Am I missing something obvious?  I thought resizing partitions was quite
> > an easy thing to do with parted?  Are there some oddities with resizing
> > partitions in Fedora that I'm not aware of, or am I just getting the
> > quality technical support you'd expect from an el-cheapo hosting company?
> >
> > The RHEL parted docs I found indicate to me that this is a simple
> > process:
> >
> > http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-3-Manual/sysadmin-guid
> >e/s 1-parted-resize-part.html
> >
> > Thanks in advance.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Lucas Chan
>
> Lucas,
>
> Just looked at that doc page for the first time.  Talk about over
> simplification......
>
> Here's the gist.  Partition tables are intended to represent partitions
> in a contiguous sense.  I.e. if you have five partitions taking up most
> of the drive, but have some extra "unallocated" space (it will reside at
> the end of the drive), if you want to grow the middle partition, you
> need to move the partitions that follow it out of the way.  Now the idea
> of parted is that it may help you to do this in that it can "copy,
> resize, move" partitions.
>
> But now things become even more fun.  It is not just about changing the
> size of the underlying partition, but also about changing
> references/pointers within the filesystem.  The default filesystem for
> RHEL3 and for Fedora has been ext3.  parted is capable of resizing ext2
> filesystems, but is having problems with the "updated" ext3 filesystems
> introduced in RHEL3 and FC1 (see bugzilla for details).
>
> I understand that some people, through much more involved, careful work,
> have been able to use parted to resize things but I've been told the
> methodologies are less than intuitive for a "newbie".  In other words,
> one false move, and bye-bye data.
>
> This all boils down to, for flexibility in resizing, we should implement
> LVM.  With LVM, the disk space is virtualized such that the underlying
> logical volume does not need to be contiguously stored on the physical
> disk/volume.
>
> So since they are going to play the backup/reformat/reimage card, you
> may want to suggest that they convert the machine to LVM to support
> future flexibility....
>
> --Rob
I don't know if this will help much, but if you (or someone you know) have a 
cd burner, you could download a live-CD. Knoppix is good, and Suse 9.1 live 
is good too. The suse one, i know, has the yast partitioner which, i think, 
does what you want.

-Steven