How do I resize the root partition (reiser)

[Portent]

I just installed Gentoo about a week ago, and I'm running out of space on the root partition. I was recompiling X and it quit because 800 megs of free space wasn't enough. Anyway, the situation is that I've got my root partition /dev/hda7 (reiser) and just after it I have a vfat storage partition. Using Windows, I made some free space between the two of them, which I now want to add to the end of hda7.

So far it looks like I have to use parted with reiserfs support. So in Gentoo, I installed all that was needed. Anyway, I guess parted won't touch a partition that's mounted (which is always the case since it's the root partition that's in question). So my question is: is there a way to unmount / while linux is still running? Alternatively, is there a way to force/trick parted into working on a mounted partition? And failing all that, is there another way to do this?

I considered boot disks, but couldn't find anything with parted and reiserfs support. I went to the trouble of burning a knoppix cd, but it turns out that they don't include reiserfs support for parted.

I'm not really concerned with how dangerous a maneuver I have to do because this system is brand new, and if it comes to it, I guess I could wipe it and start over. But I'd rather not.

Thanks,

Eddy Cooper

[Ian Goldby]

The only way is to boot from another disk with both ReiserFs support and your partition resizer program. Or perhaps you could boot from the Gentoo Install CD and have the resizer on floppy?

Another way would be to create a new partition in the disk area you've freed up and mount it as /var/tmp - as I remember this is where the compiler needs the space. You may even find a load of cruft in /var/tmp that you can delete to make enough space.

[vikwiz]

It's a great fun to play with mounted partitions with sensitive data
Be warned, that you can loose everything (althoug I did). Better to have a backup of your data.

You didn't tell me how your partition situation is, if you use LVM or EVMS. If you do, it's easier. If not, harder.

Use 'sfdisk -d' to see the partition table, save output to a file. Then if after the mentioned reiserfs partition there is an unused partition, you can delete the unused partition line, renumber the rest, and rearrange the sector numbers (size) of the reiserfs part. Then feed it back to sfdisk < parttable. He will say better to reboot, do it if you want, I never do it, but maybe it's bad habit.

If your disk is still readable then you can resize_reiserfs /dev/hdax (the reiserfs partition) even if it's mounted.

Good luck!