Change partitionning of the system

Anarchiste · 2019-09-29 08:22:13

Hello guys !

My question here is about the partitioning of my system. I made a basic installation, with 4 partitions : /boot, / , SWAP and /home :

 NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 931,5G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   200M  0 part /boot
├─sda2   8:2    0     9G  0 part [SWAP]
├─sda3   8:3    0    50G  0 part /
└─sda4   8:4    0 872,3G  0 part /home
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom

But, now, i want to change my partitions because my root partition is almost full (7.76 GB left of 50GB). The question is quite simple, but i didn't find anything for Arch (and we all know that Arch is very cough cough stable cough cough. So, i want o ask if there is a way to change partitioning (merge root and home, or removing space from home to put it to root) without losing all my data. Or do i have to remake my whole system ?
Thanks for the futures responses, and please, excuse my kinda bad english, i'm french ^^
Anarchiste

sabroad · 2019-09-29 08:33:29

Anarchiste wrote:

i want to change my partitions [...] but i didn't find anything for Arch

Third result for wiki search "resize partition" gives Resizing partitions.

Edit: this doesn't do what you want, which is also to move partitions. Try an external tool such as gparted.

Last edited by sabroad (2019-09-29 08:37:27)

Anarchiste · 2019-09-29 09:33:53

So, using gparted, i won't loose any data ?

WorMzy · 2019-09-29 09:46:44

You should back up your data before you mess with partitions. Things can (and occasionally do) go wrong.

That all being said, this is an X-Y problem, your real issue is that your root partition is becoming full. 50G is a huge amount of space for /, where is it all being used? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sy … filesystem

Anarchiste · 2019-09-29 10:57:50

Thanks so much !
Thanks to the link you send, i removed like 6Gb of useless data :

┌─<luc @ Anarchiste in ~>
└─<>──» paccache -r
==> Privilege escalation required
[sudo] Mot de passe de luc : 

==> finished: 1763 packages removed (disk space saved: 6.46 GiB)

I think it's because i install lots of programs that my root partition is almost full.

Trilby · 2019-09-29 13:06:41

There's likely more to it than that. Every package in the repo installed could take around 128GB, but that's not possible to do as many of them conflict - most notably, many of the biggest packages are different conflicting builds of huge projects (e.g., tensorflow).

I once had the goal of figuring out the maximum size of installed packages that was practically possible (without hacking PKGBUILDs). I never arrived at a number, but it'd be only a fraction of the 128GB size.

So unless you are deliberately installing every DE, every large game, every programming language and framework, etc, then I doubt your space is being eaten by your intended use. Overgrown logs filling with errors that your system is screaming at you is a much more likely culprit.

In any case, just check. Use `du` or `ncdu` to figure out what's actually using up all that space.

WorMzy · 2019-09-29 13:17:21

paccache's defaults are rather conservative, and the existence of the Arch Linux Archive removes a lot of the need for a local rollback cache, so you can probably afford to remove more stuff with paccache.

Are you sure that your installed packages take up all that much space? Unless you're using several complete DEs, office suites, and webbrowsers, I'd be surprised to see the total size exceed 20GB. Check with https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pa … #With_size

If your packages really do take up that much space, and you really do need them (i.e. they're not orphans), then I'd still advise looking into using bind mounts to migrate large directories into your ample home partition rather than adjusting the partition table. To me, resizing filesystems and changing the partition table should only be done as a last resort (or on a system where data loss isn't a problem), and your partition layout is already more than ideal (considering the wiki only recommends / be 23-32GB)

Arch Linux

#1 2019-09-29 08:22:13

Change partitionning of the system

#2 2019-09-29 08:33:29

Re: Change partitionning of the system

#3 2019-09-29 09:33:53

Re: Change partitionning of the system

#4 2019-09-29 09:46:44

Re: Change partitionning of the system

#5 2019-09-29 10:57:50

Re: Change partitionning of the system

#6 2019-09-29 13:06:41

Re: Change partitionning of the system

#7 2019-09-29 13:17:21

Re: Change partitionning of the system

Board footer