I need more space for my root partition

ac3raven · 2010-04-04 18:57:56

I can't actually give you the output of "df" or anything like that, because I can't boot into gnome atm because of a very sloppy system upgrade.

But I have 1.6gb available in / and I need about 10gb more.

I would like to take some of the space from /home and give it to /

How do I go about doing this from the terminal?

ALSO: I've already cleaned up the /.local/share/Trash and I used pacman to clean out cache and I deleted old logfiles.

Last edited by ac3raven (2010-04-04 18:59:20)

toffyrn · 2010-04-04 19:22:11

I did this recently using gparted on a live ubuntu cd. It is intuitive and worked.

However it should be possible doing the same from command line, but I don't know how...
(Please don't kill me for recommending use of ubuntu... )

loafer · 2010-04-04 19:23:46

The gparted live CD will do the job.

edit: or parted from the terminal if you have it installed.

Last edited by loafer (2010-04-04 19:33:52)

graysky · 2010-04-04 19:42:04

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=22499

ac3raven · 2010-04-04 20:17:35

if someone could show me exactly how to use gparted from commandline( I have it installed on Arch), that would be best I think. the ubuntu 8.10 live disk I have can't read ext4 and gparted in my fedora partition throws up warnings about "couldn't find valid filesystem superblock" and won't let me resize/move any of the arch partition.

The reason I ask for help with using the command line gparted is because I simply don't understand any of the instructions given via "--help" or the man pages.

.:B:. · 2010-04-04 20:19:04

8.10 is quite old, I wouldn't be surprised if it did not support ext4 at all. Get a recent version.

ac3raven · 2010-04-04 20:34:14

Ubuntu 9.10 throws up the very same flags as my Fedora partition, and I can't manipulate my arch partition.

WARNING:
e2label: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/sda4
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.

falconindy · 2010-04-04 20:39:47

I highly recommend using the SysRescueCD. It supports just about everything. I've used it for similar purposes as this (except involving btrfs).

It also has XFCE and Gparted if you're into that sort of things.

Last edited by falconindy (2010-04-04 20:40:08)

siriusb · 2010-04-04 20:41:13

If you want to resize a partition, do it unmounted. Download SystemRescueCd http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page, burn it to a cd and boot from it. You can boot into a graphical enviroment and run gparted from there, which is a quite self-explanatory application I think.
I think ubuntu support ext4 from 9.04 and not from 8.10.

ac3raven · 2010-04-04 20:43:25

siriusb wrote:

I think ubuntu support ext4 from 9.04 and not from 8.10.

Well, I tried it with 9.10, and it didn't work.

I'll try the SystemRescueCD, though this seems to be an unusually indirect approach.

toffyrn · 2010-04-04 20:46:47

I used ubuntu 9.10 on ext4 on fakeraid without any problems... What are your setup? (Is your partition damaged?)

ac3raven · 2010-04-04 20:50:50

My partition is not damaged so far as I can tell. I have no raids of any kind setup either.

Fedora 10 reports my Arch setup to be:

/dev/sda1 -- ext2 -- 102MiB -- boot
/dev/sda2 -- linux-swap -- 258MiB
/dev/sda3 -- ext3 -- 7.33GiB
/dev/sda4 -- ext3 -- 141.36GiB

But I know that Arch is an ext4 filesystem.

Last edited by ac3raven (2010-04-04 20:55:05)

madeye · 2010-04-04 20:54:08

I'd go with SystemRescueCD too. It's saved me a couple of times. And it supports just about any filesystem I've given it to chew on.

Just never do any partition resizing on a mounted filesystem. You'll just end up destroying your data. And if possible. Make a backup of your data before starting! Saves you grief later on in the process if something should go wrong.

ac3raven · 2010-04-05 00:25:24

Okay, I finally got sysresc cd up and running (fedora did not want to burn the iso properly!), and I'm typing from the live image now. I've never used this before so I how I go about backing up my /home partition before I give the root more space?

tawan · 2010-04-05 00:29:48

if you have loads of space then copy /home to either a newly made partition, some space, or better to another disk.

ac3raven · 2010-04-05 00:39:32

well, for some reason I can't mount /home to do that. it keeps saying that the device is busy or already mounted. But it's not mounted according to gparted.

tawan · 2010-04-05 00:43:23

as root

umount -a

it will give two suggestions if this is not possible. follow them.

ac3raven · 2010-04-05 00:47:40

Apparently all of my devices are busy and cannot be unmounted. Even though they are all unmounted according to gparted. But I can't mount them because they are all busy. I'm so confused.

tawan · 2010-04-05 00:48:54

didi you run gparted as root?

gksu gparted

ac3raven · 2010-04-05 00:50:16

yes.

tawan · 2010-04-05 00:50:58

PS after sudo umount -a it will give you suggestion commands to run.

when run they tell you what is using the partitions and you can deal with them.

ac3raven · 2010-04-05 00:56:05

This is the output of 'ps' after I did the 'umount -a' as root.

  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 3027 pts/1    00:00:00 zsh
 3036 pts/1    00:00:00 ps

Don't have a clue what it says.

ac3raven · 2010-04-05 00:59:39

I tried 'lsof' and it looks like like under the 'device' column, I get mostly (0,18) and occasionally (0,15).

tawan · 2010-04-05 01:05:01

sorry I meant PS like post scriptum not the command, sorry for that.

after sudo umount -a (root unmount all) when devices are too busy to be unmounted it gives options to see why. Yes one is lsof. I forgot the other. Normally from these you can see what is preventing the un-mount and deal with it.

You have already run gparted as root and done the unmounts there (right click, unmount) - also check that swap is off "swapoff" (right click swap in gparted and choose swapoff) and that allp possible partitions, especially those listed after the important one, are unmounted.

ac3raven · 2010-04-05 01:19:05

the option to unmount any partition is grayed out. I looked under the 'information' for each partition and it says they are all unmounted. And when I try to turn swap off, I get a big error message:

swapon: /dev/sda2: found swap signature: version 1, page-size 4, same byte order
swapon: /dev/sda2: pagesize=4096, swapsize=271433728, devsize=271434240
swapon: /dev/sda2: swapon failed: Invalid argument

and that happens on any partition that I try to turn swap off for.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-04-04 18:57:56

I need more space for my root partition

#2 2010-04-04 19:22:11

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