[FC5] Change file system & merge drive without lossing data???

[ronald]

Deepak Shrestha wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have one 40GB drive and this is where I have my FC5 installed.
> Besides, I have another drive 30GB drive, which I partitioned into
> 20GB(movies) and 10GB(mp3) vfat (FAT32) filesystem. It is almost full.
> Obviously the reason for VFAT is so that I can use it with Windows
> machine but I want to change the file system of this drive to ext3 and
> merge them into one partition (single drive single partition) to use
> it solely with my FC5.
> 
> ====================
> 20GB + 10GB = 30GB single drive and (ext3 file system)
> ====================
> 
> I know backing up is the good practice but I have no extra drive to
> backup my files. So may be I need to change this first two drive into
> ext3 and then merge them together.
> 
> is it possible what I am thinking of???
> 
> by the way from the previous post I was able to figure out that there
> is partitioning tools like parted, Gparted and QTparted.
> 
> I had installed these but I am lost.
> 
> Gparted shows my drives but no menu is active (do I need to unmount
> the drive first??)

what's e2fsck saying, when you run it on mounted file systems ?
why ?

> QTparted shows my drives and only format drive is active.
> 
> If its possible, can somebody guide me how to accomplish this???
> 
> Thanks!
> 

you should be able to *resize* your 20GB partition to 30GB
http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/manual/parted.html#resize

but you need to back up your 10GB mp3 partition !

it's dangerous anyway and i saw some error regarding to "special 
features enabled on ext3 bla bla"
if these are ext3 related: convert it temp. to ext2...

no one around which can borrow you 30GB space, maybe network ?


-- 

    ronald

teamwork is essential.
it allows to blame someone else...