I have Redhat 9 installed on a 40gb drive. With it's imminent demise I want to reduce its / partition to free up space for another distro.

I've tried qparted on knoppix but the resize option is greyed out.

Has anyone any suggestions.


AK

try umounting the drive first

try umounting the drive first

-Joey

Had a partition with fedora installed so I used parted from the command line. It failed to resize the partition but gave me a meaningful message -

"This ext2 file system has a rather strange layout"

Googled the error. It would seem you can't, not yet, resize a ext3 partition. Somebody suggested converting it back to ext2 resizing it and then converting it back to ext3!

Converted it to ext2. Could resize but it failed!!

Somebody else suggested that the partition could be deleted and then re-created with the new size and as long as it started at the same point the data would be there!!! Am I gullable or what!!!!

Tried it and guess what the data wasn't there!!!!!! Only lost+found.

At least I had a backup of the data. Restoring at the moment. If that fails it's goodbye Redhat.

AK

Restored succsessfully from backup.

The only problem was that I hadn't labeled the partition. So amended
/etc/fstab to use /dev/hdc2 instead of the label and redhat booted up perfectly.

Good learning experience!!!!