[ale] Oops - Want to rearrange two partitions

[ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com (Jim)]

John Mills wrote:
> ALErs -
>
> I just installed SuSE-10.1 and set up a 1GB partition for /var. From the
> first login I see that /var is about 35% full, which seems much too close
> for comfort down the road.
>
> My reason for fixing size of /var was to ensure that it not grow and lock
> the file system.
>
> The next-lower partition is /home at /dev/hdb7, with 10GB. 
> The next-higher partition is /opt at /dev/hdb9, with 10GB. 
>
> I would like to give up 1GB of /home or /var and add it to /var at
> /dev/hdb8. (All three are logical partitions within the same extended
> partition.)
>
> If this was all a bad idea in the first place, I guess I could move /var 
> into one of the other partitions, but then I will want to recover its 
> space to a neighboring partition.
>
> How might I resize partitions to move an extra GB from into /var without 
> trashing my installation, else move it and recover its space?
>
> TIA.
>  - Mills
>
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>   
Since we're contributing to a "fix" that has already occurred, I 
recently installed Asterisk at home which formats the whole bloody disk 
into three partitions, boot, root and swap.  Since I was wasting a lot 
of space, had tried to upgrade to Tribox, failed and had to reinstall 
Asterisk at home, I wanted to put Centos on a separate partition so I could 
try to get Tribox working in my spare time while Asterisk at home continued 
to run.  This system is too small to try to use VMware on.  So I cut a 
boot CD with gparted on it to reduce the size of the Asterisk at home root 
partition and did a clean network install of Centos.  Then I hacked the 
grub/menu.lst to let me dual boot the systems.  Now when I don't need my 
PBX I can boot Centos and try to make Tribox work.  I have found 
instructions on how to get Tribox working on an already running Centos 
system.

Long story short, I found gparted worked quite well to resize ext3 
partitions.  Parted wouldn't touch it for some reason.     It complained 
about an incompatible option to ext3, whatever that was.

I shrunk /dev/hda2 from about 38 G to 19G and then when I did the Centos 
install, I installed everything to a new partition /dev/hda5.  I suspect 
I could have reused the /boot on /dev/hda1 but didn't want to chance 
screwing something up.

Again, I'm commenting only to document a way to get both Asterisk at home 
and Tribox working on the same system, albeit not at the same time and 
to put a plug in for gparted in case no one knows about it.  The whole 
thing fits on one of those mini CDs at about 30 Mb. 

Jim.