Greetings all, Sorry for the wall of text but I just figured I would issue a word of warning based on my experience transitioning to Fedora 12 and the mess that was made in the process. Attempted to preupgrade and got hit with the "a 200MB /boot partition is too small" issue on two machines (annoyance #0). Both have three partitions but one is Windows/boot(ext3)/root(ext4) and the other is Windows64bit/boot(ext3)/lvm2(ext4). I figured (after clearing out old kernels and still not having enough space) that I could resize partitions from a F12 LiveUSB with gparted as I have non-destructively done this many many times in the past. On the first machine, I shrunk the ext4 partition so that the space was at the beginning and grew the /boot partition to fill up the freed space. This I considered to be the trickier operation since it has to move a whole lot of data down the disk to preserve it. That took a few hours to complete but seemed to work out just fine. So I moved on to my other machine. I quickly discovered that gparted cannot resize lvm formatted partitions (annoyance #1). So instead, I decided to shrink the NTFS partition (something I haven't had any issues with in recent times) and grow the boot partition. I figured that would be less of an issue since less data would have to move around. Shrunk the NTFS partition and tried to fill up the space with the new boot partition. But no matter what size I chose to shrink the NTFS partition down to, the boot partition would always leave 4MB or unallocated space after it if I told gparted to round to nearest block. (annoyance #2). So I picked a new size for the NTFS and unchecked the block rounding option for the boot partition and then that filled the space tightly. The process to make the changes took only a few seconds (which made me kind of suspicious). So I rebooted to the linux install and it worked fine. I rebooted to my Windows install and it started to boot and would crash and reboot soon after. So I went about trying to reverse the partition changes that I made. There was nothing I could do to make the partitions go back to the size they were before and not jump to some number I hadn't set and leave little slices of unallocated space between the partitions. So I set it as close as I could. But now the NTFS resizer cannot complete because the filesystem is too big for the partition (something windows should have corrected on first boot by going through a disk check but crashed instead) and resizing the boot partition back to close to 200MB just made the computer completely unbootable. gparted worked in such an unpredictable fashion in the second case, that I don't even know where to start with reporting bugs. I have done partition editing many many times with it and have run into scenarios that I know to avoid but for the most part it works quite well. I am a bit disappointed this time. Just a word of warning, don't think you can avoid backing up your system just because things worked out in the past. /Mike -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
