I tried to look through other threads for an answer to this so I appologize if this has been answered before. I ran out of space on the root partition (1.9gig) and since my /home partition (7.5gig) was basically unused, I decided to swap the two. I first backed up (dump) both and then reformated the /home partition. I then restored the root to the pristine partition and labeled the old root volume to mnt and relabeled the new partition to /. After rebooting the computer and checking the / partition df still reports that it is 1.9 gig. I swapped the two partitions back and rebooted and mounted the new partition as /mnt and df reports that it is 7.5 gig. Huh?? what am I doing wrong.....

Thanks,
Darren

Sounds like you used dd to backup (and restore). That is a byte-level copy - the defined filesystem remains the same regardless of partition size.
Better to use tar (or derivative) or cp -a /... /... say.

Anyway, you should be able to safely resize the filesystem after the restore using the appropriate tool for your filesystem.
You have a backup if it all goes to hell ...

I tried using cp (after re formating the partition) to copy / onto the new partition, but after rebooting on the new / partition, it still reports 100% full. But if I mount the old / partition and relabel the new partition to /mnt and remount, it shows 26% full. -still containing all the files and directories from the / partition.

Here are the df's from both scenarios, the first is with the new 7.5 gig partition loaded as / with 1.9 gig of data, it has the old / mounted as /mnt and shows that it is still 100% full. The second df is with the original / loaded with the new partition mounted and /mnt....

The first...

[root@lvtlard07 /]# df -ah
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 1.9G 1.9G 0 100% /
none 0 0 0 - /proc
none 0 0 0 - /sys
none 0 0 0 - /dev/pts
usbfs 0 0 0 - /proc/bus/usb
/dev/sda3 407M 26M 360M 7% /boot
none 3.0G 0 3.0G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda6 4.0G 107M 3.7G 3% /tmp
/dev/sda5 11G 3.0G 6.8G 31% /usr
/dev/sda12 496M 127M 344M 27% /var
/dev/sdb1 269G 11G 245G 5% /data
none 0 0 0 - /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc
/dev/sda11 1.9G 1.9G 0 100% /mnt

and the second.....

[root@lvtlard07 ~]# df -ah
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda11 1.9G 1.9G 0 100% /
none 0 0 0 - /proc
none 0 0 0 - /sys
none 0 0 0 - /dev/pts
usbfs 0 0 0 - /proc/bus/usb
/dev/sda3 407M 26M 360M 7% /boot
none 3.0G 0 3.0G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda6 4.0G 107M 3.7G 3% /tmp
/dev/sda5 11G 3.0G 6.8G 31% /usr
/dev/sda12 496M 127M 344M 27% /var
/dev/sdb1 269G 11G 245G 5% /data
none 0 0 0 - /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc
/dev/sda2 7.1G 1.9G 4.9G 29% /mnt