resizing root partition

[Daniel]

I have come to the point where I need to resize my root partition. I made it only 4 GB when I installed when I really should have made it about 10GB. I would like some guidance as to how to go about doing this. Some information: I am using the ReiserFS filesystem, I want to take 6 GB from /home and give it to /. I know I need to back up my /home partition by tarring it and copying it to another hard drive in case some of /home gets wiped out or corrupted in the resizing process. Do I just simply compress it as a tar archive or do you have to compress it specially? (I thought I read something about having to do it a certain way). Should I use a Gparted live cd to resize the partitions?

[M0E-lnx]

Live cd is probably the easiest way to do this. No question about it. No need to jack with your files or anything. Just boot it and run gparted.

A vl light cd or even the Vectorlinux 6.0 install cd can do it. Both have gparted in them.

[newt]

as M0E suggests, a live cd with gparted is probably the best way.  I've actually just finished doing something very similar using Parted Magic (gparted as the utility) a few moments ago and everything worked out splendid. Shrunk an ntfs; moved and expanded a reiser; expanded a logical; moved a reiser within the logical; deleted and recreated a swap within the logical at a larger size. After all of that, I rebooted and came right back where I left off an hour ago - no problems. Of course, I did tar and backup my /home prior to any of the hard drive partition manipulations.  Hopefully yours goes as smoothly.

[Daniel]

Thanks for the replies! I have 2 things I would like to clarify. VL live cd's come with GParted? (since 6.0 I guess) Is it in the menu somewhere? Or do you have to start it from a terminal? Also, I don't have to tar /home a certain way? I can just right-click it and select compress as tar?

EDIT: Actually one more thing. Will /home get corrupted or lose data if I shrink it? (I will back up /home but I was just wondering...)

[newt]

Probably, yes. You can just right-click and select compress as tar. If it finishes without any errors then it should be good to go.

You will only be able to shrink /home as much as gparted will let you, which is generally no less than the amount of drive space actually being used. For instance, if you /home is 9gb and you're using 5gb then gparted should not let you shrink that partition any more than 4gb max.

Regarding backing up /home:
I actually followed Granny's advice from a different thread but just backedup my user directory rather than all of /home:

If you don't have a Linux-formatted external drive, you can tar your /home directory before copying it to any external media. You want to use
tar -cvpsPf
modifiers to preserve ownership and permissions. (Some say this isn't strictly necessary but I know it works, so I use it.) When you restore you want to use
tar -xpsPf
to make sure the files are restored with your ownership and permissions intact.

I ran:
tar -cvpsPf /home/<username>.tar /home/<username> --exclude=My_Network

This created a tar file in /home named newt.tar containing everything within /home/newt, however I had to also exclude a network mounted directory which is probably not the case for you.  After than, I gzipped it to make the transfer over wireless a bit quicker using this command:
gzip -c /home/<username>.tar > /home/<username>.tar.gz

[nightflier]

VL6.0 Light Live does have gparted available from the system menu.