RE:Resizing file partitions
Kapil Khosla writes:
> I have exceeded my LInux Partition space and and want to
> increase the partition size now.
> I have 2 windows partitions on /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2.
> Is there any way of giving that space to Linux without
> formatting my disk,
First, make backups of everything important!
If you mean without formatting the DOS partition into something else,
then you can just cp some whole directory to /dev/hda1, then mount
/dev/hda1 at the directory.
eg:
/usr/local has 1GB of data
/dev/hda1 has room for > 1GB
% mount /dev/hda1 /mnt
% cp -a /usr/local /mnt
% # edit /etc/fstab so that you have something like:
% #/dev/hda1 /usr/local vfat rw 0 2
To test things, use
% mount /dev/hda1 /usr/local
and see if it worked
If it did, then you can do the following:
% umount /usr/local
% \rm -fr /usr/local
% mount /usr/local
If you have old windows data on /dev/hda1, it will show up on
/usr/local.
You can also 'mount' just a certain directory using soft links (not
really mounting things), or NFS.
Eg:
Make a link from /usr/local to a dir on /dev/hda1:
% #edit /etc/fstab like:
% #/dev/hda1 /dos/c vfat rw 0 2
% mv /usr/local /usr/local.old
% ln -s /dos/c/some/path /usr/local
To use NFS, mount the windows partition, export a directory with
/etc/exports, then mount it using NFS at some mount point (by editing
/etc/fstab).
It would probably be nicer if you could resize your DOS partition(s)
by defragging it and resizing it using fips or Partition Magic or
gpart and then making a new ext2 partition using mke2fs.
One other really easy method is just to buy a new hard drive--this
way, there's no messing with partitions.
Andrew.
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