Resizing those partitions!

[Paul Howarth]

On Sat, 2005-05-28 at 22:23 -0700, Richard Crawford wrote:
> I have an FC3 server which I primarily use to store my wife's and my MP3 files 
> in a directory on /var (/var/shared/music, actually).  I thought that 30GB 
> would be plenty of room to store all of our music, but I was, of course, 
> wrong.  The drive in question is 160GB.  I'd like to resize some of the 
> partitions (I have 50GB assigned to /home, which is never going to fill up).  
> This is a single-boot system running only FC3, so I don't need to deal with 
> resizing NTFS or FAT32 partitions.  It's a very basic installation, without 
> very many bells and whistles (I do have GNOME installed on it, though).
> 
> # fdisk -l
> Disk /dev/hda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
> /dev/hda2              14        6387    51199155   83  Linux
> /dev/hda3            6388       10211    30716280   83  Linux
> /dev/hda4           10212       19457    74268495    5  Extended
> /dev/hda5           10212       19457    74268463+  8e  Linux LVM
> 
> # df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
>                        70G  3.0G   63G   5% /
> /dev/hda1              99M   13M   82M  13% /boot
> none                  125M     0  125M   0% /dev/shm
> /dev/hda2              49G  360M   46G   1% /home
> /dev/hda3              29G   28G     0 100% /var
> 
> It looks to me that I can move possibly 35 GB from /dev/hda2 to /dev/hda3.  Is 
> there a way to snag some of that space from / as well?  70GB seems a bit much 
> for that partition.
> 
> Or should I just give in and rebuild the system from scratch?
> 
> Any guidance at all would be greatly appreciated.

Why did you build the system with separate "fixed" partitions in
addition to the main LVM partition? It's a shame, because if you had
used LVM for everything (except /boot of course), it would be fairly
easy to shuffle space about.

I'd be inclined to (in rescue mode) move everything from your full
30G /var partition into the ample space you have in /, then
change /dev/hda3 to a Linux LVM partition, and add that partition into
VolGroup00. You could then, if you wished, create a new logical volume
for /music and/or /var with the newly-available space in the volume
group. You could also reduce size of the LogVol00 filesystem and volume
to free up yet more space for additional volumes.

The LVM HOWTO is well worth a read before doing anything as drastic as a
reinstall.

P.S. Have you done a "yum clean packages" recently? If not, that might
free up some space in /var.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>