Help resizing root partition

[snakep]

Hello,

I need to resize the / partition so that I can upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04 or later. I plan to use gparted. What are the steps I need to take? I have gathered from reading some threads that there can be problems with grub after resizing. I want to get this right the first time.

The results of df -h:


Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 4.6G 3.7G 767M 83% /
varrun 503M 92K 503M 1% /var/run
varlock 503M 0 503M 0% /var/lock
udev 503M 72K 503M 1% /dev
devshm 503M 0 503M 0% /dev/shm
lrm 503M 38M 466M 8% /lib/modules/2.6.22-16-generic/volatile
/dev/sda6 549M 69M 452M 14% /boot
/dev/sda3 29G 7.0G 21G 26% /home
/dev/sda1 40G 36G 3.6G 91% /media/sda1
/dev/scd0 493M 493M 0 100% /media/cdrom0


Basically, I want to move about 5 GB from /home (on /dev/sda3) to / (on /dev/sda2). Windows XP is on /dev/sda1.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

[Partyboi2]

Backup all your important stuff before working on partitions, then boot a ubuntu live cd and when you are at the Desktop open gparted (System>Admin>Partition Editor) make sure that the partitions you want to work on are unmounted. Then select sda3 and right click and select the resize option and shrink it using the "Free Space preceeding" and adjust it to the size you want. Then right click on sda2 and select the resize option and increase to use all the space available then apply the changes.

[snakep]

Thanks for the help. I've never used gparted before, so I'm a little nervous. I read in one thread that there is sometimes a problem with the /etc/fstab file, something about the UUID numbers changing. How do I deal with that?

[caljohnsmith]

Thanks for the help. I've never used gparted before, so I'm a little nervous. I read in one thread that there is sometimes a problem with the /etc/fstab file, something about the UUID numbers changing. How do I deal with that?

The UUID of your main root Ubuntu partition should not change when you resize it in gparted; you might be thinking of a swap partition for example, because resizing a swap partition will change its UUID. If you want to see in order to make sure, before you run gparted open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and do:

sudo blkid -c /dev/null
That will show the current UUIDs of your partitions; go ahead and use gparted to resize your partitions as desired, and then run that command again. I think you will see that the UUID does not change for any ext3 partitions that you resize (i.e. your main Ubuntu install for instance). Good luck and let us know how it goes.

[snakep]

Success! I increased /dev/sda2 by 7 GB and changed /dev/sda3 accordingly. More importantly, the UUID's did not change, and grub loaded perfectly. Now I just need to run the upgrade.