[vox-tech] Resizing partition ext3

[Ken Bloom]

On Saturday 10 March 2007 20:39, Alex Mandel wrote:
> What I have(partitions):
> P1: NTFS(Windows)
> P2: Ext3(/)
> P3: Fat32
>
> What I want to do:
> Make P1 smaller
> Make P2 larger
>
> Questions:
> As long as I turn off journaling on my ext3(make it ext2) then I
> should be able to resize it, even if that means adding to the front
> end of the partition?

Would be nice. I've resized a few ext2 partitions, but haven't found any 
way to move the front of the partion, short of nuking the partition 
completely and restoring from a backup.

If you've got enough free space on the drive, you could set up a 
temporary partition elsewhere and just copy all of the stuff. I've done 
this a couple times when I've decided to resize partitions on my laptop 
while commuting to school. (Resizing partitions while commuting is 
living dangerously, but I know that my documents are safely in 
Subversion if anything goes wrong, and I know that I can always find a 
CD and start from scratch when I reach school if something goes wrong.)

> I'm not worried about resizing the NTFS, that's how I got linux onto
> this machine to begin with.
>
> Do I need to have free space in order to perform operations like this
> other than the space that is obviously being shifted?

Only if you take my "move stuff to another partition" strategy.

> I'm going to backup /etc, /home but how do I backup a list of all
> installed software so that if something goes wrong and I want to get
> back to what I have without remembering every package I've ever
> added. Preferably some automatic list that I could re-apt
> -An alternate use to this idea that I've been thinking about, if I
> change computers and want to bring a new machine up to the same set
> of software fast I would need some list that apt can run through.

WARNING: UNTESTED

I use
$ aptitude search -F '%100p' '~i!~M' > thefile
to backup my package list

I've never tried restoring this way, but I would use
# xargs aptitude install --schedule-only < thefile
# aptitude install
to restore. The advantage of doing it this way would be to have aptitude 
remember which packages were manually installed and which were 
automatically installed as dependancies after the reinstall.

I have used Henry House's instructions, and I know that his instructions 
work.

--Ken

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/
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