On Thursday 27 January 2005 20:22, Robert Locke wrote: > On Fri, 2005-01-28 at 10:05 +1100, Lucas Chan wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I recently signed up with a super-cheap dedicated server company to run > > one of my personal sites. The box was pre-installed with FC2. > > > > Some of the partitions they set up on it are ridiculously small. I > > contacted them saying: > > > > "I'm quickly running out of space on a couple of partitions and need them > > to be resized. I understand this needs to be performed at the console > > with a boot disk so I'm submitting a ticket to you guys." > > > > They responded saying: > > > > "We cannot resize the partitions without reformatting/reimaging the > > drive." > > > > Am I missing something obvious? I thought resizing partitions was quite > > an easy thing to do with parted? Are there some oddities with resizing > > partitions in Fedora that I'm not aware of, or am I just getting the > > quality technical support you'd expect from an el-cheapo hosting company? > > > > The RHEL parted docs I found indicate to me that this is a simple > > process: > > > > http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-3-Manual/sysadmin-guid > >e/s 1-parted-resize-part.html > > > > Thanks in advance. > > > > Regards, > > > > Lucas Chan > > Lucas, > > Just looked at that doc page for the first time. Talk about over > simplification...... > > Here's the gist. Partition tables are intended to represent partitions > in a contiguous sense. I.e. if you have five partitions taking up most > of the drive, but have some extra "unallocated" space (it will reside at > the end of the drive), if you want to grow the middle partition, you > need to move the partitions that follow it out of the way. Now the idea > of parted is that it may help you to do this in that it can "copy, > resize, move" partitions. > > But now things become even more fun. It is not just about changing the > size of the underlying partition, but also about changing > references/pointers within the filesystem. The default filesystem for > RHEL3 and for Fedora has been ext3. parted is capable of resizing ext2 > filesystems, but is having problems with the "updated" ext3 filesystems > introduced in RHEL3 and FC1 (see bugzilla for details). > > I understand that some people, through much more involved, careful work, > have been able to use parted to resize things but I've been told the > methodologies are less than intuitive for a "newbie". In other words, > one false move, and bye-bye data. > > This all boils down to, for flexibility in resizing, we should implement > LVM. With LVM, the disk space is virtualized such that the underlying > logical volume does not need to be contiguously stored on the physical > disk/volume. > > So since they are going to play the backup/reformat/reimage card, you > may want to suggest that they convert the machine to LVM to support > future flexibility.... > > --Rob I don't know if this will help much, but if you (or someone you know) have a cd burner, you could download a live-CD. Knoppix is good, and Suse 9.1 live is good too. The suse one, i know, has the yast partitioner which, i think, does what you want. -Steven
