Safe to resize used partitions?

pickarooney

I have a secondary data disk divided into a 140GB partition and a 60GB partition. The 60GB is currently empty and useless while the 140GB is almost full. Is it safe for me to unmount the disk and combine the partition with qtparted? Assuming I delete the smaller one, can I just make the larger one inactive and extend the size of it, or will I risk losing everything that's on it? If there's a risk, I can simply copy data from one partition to the other.

philologos

yeah I've done it with NTFS partitions before... it's fine
now I use the whole 250GB SATA disk I have for Linux though

liamo

I've never had a problem extending a partition. I have, however, run into problems shrinking a partition.

pickarooney

Hmm, deleted the small partition, but qtpqrted is not offering me the option of extending the larger one into its place. What other partitioning tools are there out there?

ethernet

I used SuSE 10 to shrink my Windows partition [NTFS] a few months back. Lost everything for the first time [has since happened twice for other reasons].

So I'll say what everyone else preaches: backup, backup, backup.

Capt'n Midnight

haven't had any problems using the knoppix boot cd for this
qtparted calls ntfsresize so very handy but you can run ntfsresize in a console to check all is well first.

advice, delete any files you don't need, do a defrag, so all the data is at the start of the partition and scandisk on the drive too, as linux & co won't be able to fix any ntfs problems

pickarooney

It's an ext3 partition. I tried to expand it yesterday, but had to leave for work. When I came back my girlfriend had rebooted the PC, having clicked away any windows that were covering up Skype. "There was some kind of error messag I think..." I don't seem to have lost any data, but the resizing failed.
Not sure if I'll risk it a second time.

pickarooney

Well, I did, and the PC crashed after 5 minutes.
Hmm, time to reformat for the third time this week? *grumbles about that lovely stable OS from those nice men at Redmond.

philologos

pickarooney wrote:

*grumbles about that lovely stable OS from those nice men at Redmond.

Stable and Microsoft don't go together. Personally I find Linux to be way more stable than Windows XP.

pickarooney

OK, finally got gparted to resize the partition after three crashes.
Luckily nothing seems to be lost. However, although gparted tells me that /dev/hdb1, mounted at /media/supersize is 189.92GB, bash, krusader etc. tell me that it's still 145GB. I tried umount and mount to see would it change the recognized size, but I think some info in fstab might be telling the OS how many blocks to mount at /dev/hdb1
I haven't rebooted yet, that said.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# /dev/sda3
UUID=23cd75dd-8522-4cc8-8026-43d34facd54f /               ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /dev/sda1
UUID=38771644-df5d-4863-95ef-4abcf0a9c696 /boot           ext3    defaults        0       2
# /dev/sda4
UUID=6aca9cac-5354-4183-bf88-68e9e62bed9a /home           ext3    defaults        0       2
# /dev/hda6
UUID=f3466d96-c519-11d7-9a37-a027fa319c88 /media/oldhome  ext3    defaults        0       2
# /dev/hda7
UUID=bb8c5418-a024-4cc0-a287-4b1b083042af /media/oldsystem ext3    defaults        0       2
# /dev/hdb1
UUID=f084d777-e5ba-49df-b71b-729b2c0d2475 /media/supersize ext3    defaults        0       2
# /dev/sda5
UUID=7db0edf9-d00d-4b15-a5c3-c738a9091488 none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/hdd        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
/dev/hdc        /media/cdrom1   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0

Khannie

Jakkass wrote:

Stable and Microsoft don't go together. Personally I find Linux to be way more stable than Windows XP.

I find both to be rock solid, though I don't use XP any more.

pickarooney

Same after reboot, with a twist. Gparted tells me I'm using 175GB of the 189GB partition, QTparted says I'm using 131GB of an 189GB partition and df says my partition is only 145GB, 131GB is used and there are 7.2GB remaining!

Now, I'm no mathematician, but something doesn't quite add up (or subtract) there.

FWIW qtparted gives this error on shutdown:
Error: File system was not cleanly unmounted! You should run e2fsck. Modifying an unclean file system could cause severe corruption.

I've run e2fsk as root on the device, but it ran for less than a second and gave no output.

Have I accidentally activated some sort of fileystem double accounting mode, and if so, where can I find my tax-free 40GB?

pickarooney

Found it (with a little help). I needed to resize the filesystem along with the partition with
resize2fs -p /dev/hdb1