Re: How to reclaim space on hard drive not partitioned fully initially?

[Mitchell Laks <mlaks@verizon.net>]

Dear Mike,

Thank you very much for your extraordinarily clear explanation of what was 
going on and plan for proceeding. I  read it and this is what I did.

I used the fact that my partitions were

/dev/hda1  /boot
/dev/hda2  /
/dev/hda3  /home

and all i had on the extended partition was the swap.
I removed the swap, and extended partition and 
recreated the extended partition and swap  pushed at the end of the drive.
The I deleted the /home partition, created it again using all the free space 
and then extended the file system within the bigger partition. Here is what I 
did.

1. I Backed up all my /home data via rsync to another machine.

2. used quantian (a knoppix variant) disc. 

3. Booted into quantian, 

4. swapoff to turn off use of 
the /dev/hda5 linux swap partition within quantian

5. used parted to remove logical swap partition /dev/hda5
and remove /dev/hda4 the extended partition.

using  parted

rm 5
rm 4

6. created a new /dev/hda4 extended partition at the end of the drive (last 2 
gb).

mkpart extended 112564.819  114470.969

7. added a new swap logical partition to the new extended partition at the 
end.

mkpartfs logical  linux-swap 112564.819  114470.969

8. tried to run qtparted to extend the /dev/hda3 to cover the 'gap' before 
the /dev/hda4 and /dev/hda5 . qtparted refused saying: that "my ext2 (3) file 
system was strange and qtparted didnt support it yet".

9. I then ran 

tunefs -O '^has_journal' /dev/hda3 

this converted /dev/hda3  ie /home from ext3 to a ext2 file system.

10. I tried once again to run qtparted to extend this (now ext2) file system 
to the full intervening space. 
I still got the error message about a 'strange' file system not supported.

11. So then I ran fdisk. I wrote down the beginning cylinder number of 

/dev/hda3 (2445) and !!!!deleted the  /dev/hda3!!!!, 

VERY SCARY  

12,  then still under fdisk I did:
 
n to create a new partition started at cylinder 2445 (default choice) and 
ended at 14350 (default choice!!). Then I did

13. resize2fs -p /dev/hda3

It refused. It  told me first I had to run: 

14. e2fsck -f /dev/hda3

I did that and it did what it wanted.

15. resize2fs -p /dev/hda3

16. tune2fs -h /dev/hda3

17. remounted the /dev/hda3 on /home 

YABADABADOO!!!

I now have a 90GB /home partition.

Thank you very much for your help!!

Mitchell