root partition resize

[phredd]

Hi all

Currently I have a root partition of around 8GB and my /home partition also around 8GB.. I'd like to move a bit of space from my root partition to /home as it seems like it would be more useful there (8GB overkill for root?)

Is there anything I should check/do before resizing in DiskDrake?

While I'm on the subject: for some reason my /home directory seems to have an additional root directory tree in it... shouldn't it just contain my user directories, not a repeat of all the root directorys?

- No idea how this happened, maybe something to do with me re-installing Mandrake 9.1... somehow root dirs installed on my /home partition aswell as / ?

Cheers! ;)

[spowel4]

To move some of your /root space to /home you could boot from a Knoppix cd and do it that way. I think the process would be: boot from the Knoppix cd; copy everything in the /root partition and the /home partition to somewhere else on the hard drive other than either /root or /home so you'll have a backup of the files because running fdisk will destroy any data in those partitions; run fdisk and make whatever changes you wish to the sizes of /root and /home; copy the files back to their respective partitions; reboot and you should be able to see the changes in partition size. There is probably a better/easier way to do this than what I've just layed out but this should work AFAIK.

[DrChuck]

Better still, boot with knoppix, run partimage on your / partition and save a compressed image to somewhere on /home. Compression is 2.5x to 3x in my experience. Then resize /. I second spowel4's comments - spend more time thinking about how to recover if you mess up.

I use a 3GB / partition, which includes padding for /tmp. Only problem I have ever encountered is downloading iso images - the download is initially saved to /tmp. So maybe you could estimate how much tmp space you need, and create a separate partition for that, or else symlink it to /home.