Resizing Gentoo's root partition (not recognized)

bartszyszka · n00b Joined: 23 May 2002 Posts: 29

Hi, I'm having trouble figuring out how to resize the partition that Gentoo is mounted on. I have Gentoo setup to dual-boot with Windows, but have run out of disk space in Gentoo, so I made my Windows partition smaller to create room for Gentoo. I'd like to resize the root partition, but Parted is giving me problems. When I run Parted, I get:
Using /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc
Warning: Unable to align partition properly. This probably means that another
partitioning tool generated an incorrect partition table, because it didn't have
the correct BIOS geometry. It is safe to ignore,but ignoring may cause
(fixable) problems with some boot loaders.

And then when I try to resize I get:
Disk geometry for /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc: 0.000-9590.273 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags
1 0.031 101.975 primary ext3
2 101.975 360.834 primary linux-swap
3 360.835 3498.530 primary
4 4894.835 9585.659 primary fat32 boot, lba
(parted) resize 3 360.835 4894.834
Error: Could not detect file system.

Any ideas? I'd like to resize this partition without loosing data on it. Does anyone think it might be a good idea to try to get rid of the grub partition and to use the extra space by creating a whole seperate one for /usr or something else (although I can't figure out if /usr is already over the 1.3GB that I want to add)?

plasmagunman · l33t Joined: 07 Jun 2002 Posts: 604 Location: berlin

well, i'm not used to parted, but let's see. first of all: the start of the partition must stay fixed. if your free space which you want to append is before your linux that won't work. if the free part is directly behind the linux-partition i always rewrite the partition table with fdisk, so that the start of the partition is exactly the same and the end is, well, where you want it, but it must be greater than before, otherwise you run danger to kill some data... then reboot and do a "resize3fs /dev/PARTITION". if resize3fs doesn't exist try it with resize2fs, read the manpage. i think the device has to be unmounted for this.
_________________
please, feel free to correct my english. - por favor, corrige mi español.

bartszyszka · n00b Joined: 23 May 2002 Posts: 29

Yes, if as you look at what I pasted into my first post, you'll notice that I am in fact resizing from the same start position and there is freespace after that. The problem is that my root partition, /dev/hda3, isn't being recognized as ext3 by parted, even though everything seems to be working fine in fdisk. And I don't think I can fix that with fdisk since I don't want anything on this partition to be formatted. I have a very beautifully working Gentoo system. Now is resize3fs part of Gentoo? Because I don't have that command available and there doesn't seem to be an e3fsprogs package (I do have resize2fs through e2fsprogs, though...). I looked up 'man resize2fs' and it doesn't look like that command is for enlarging the partition either. That man page suggests that I use fdisk to delete the partition and make a new one with the larger size, which I obviously am trying to avoid. See I have Partition Magic in Windows and I've used that to resize FAT32 partitions without dataloss without a problem. My version is 6.0, though, and I'm wondering if maybe 7.0 will let me resize the ext3 partition? The website says it has full ext2 support and I've read ext3 is not much different?

craftyc · Guru Joined: 23 May 2002 Posts: 443 Location: Behind You.