Debian root partition resizing

debianpartition

I just noticed that the root partition of my not-so-long-ago configured server is only 5gb

thats not much seeing as i allready use 4gb and still need to install a lot of things…

i was foolish enough to use the default config from OVH assuming they know their stuff 😛

since i have some data on the data partition it would be a pain in the … to backup and reconfigure it all

is it possible to repartition the drive to use a new part of the drive say 15-20gb without data loss ? by simply copying the root partition to a new place (from sda2) ? i can live with loosing the 5gb of the start of the drive 😛

heres df -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             5.0G  3.9G  897M  82% /
tmpfs                 998M     0  998M   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                   10M  144K  9.9M   2% /dev
tmpfs                 998M     0  998M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda2             226G  7.2G  208G   4% /home

and fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0000db26

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1         653     5242880+  83  Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.    <== now this is bad.. thx OVH :F
/dev/sda2             653       30336   238426112   83  Linux
/dev/sda3           30336       30401      526016   82  Linux swap / Solaris

Best Answer

What I think that I'd do is to something like this:

  1. cd /home
  2. mkdir home
  3. mv * home
  4. put the contents of the current root directory to /home using dump/restore
  5. edit the new fstab to show root as /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda1 as spare.
  6. You'll have to run grub to point the booting to the right location (pretty easy).
  7. And you have a large root on /dev/sda2 and maybe use /dev/sda1 as scratch space.

I think that this will be easier than trying mess with repartitioning.

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