Resizing Partitions

[underpope]

I greatly underestimated how much space I was going to need in my /var partition, where I'm storing my music files. This is a 160GB drive, and I only allowed 30GB for music files. This is the output of df -h:

richard@HAGRID: ~
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
70G 3.0G 63G 5% /
/dev/hda1 99M 13M 82M 13% /boot
none 125M 0 125M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda2 49G 360M 46G 1% /home
/dev/hda3 29G 28G 0 100% /var

Now, I can happily resize my hda2 to 10GB or so and move the rest to hda3, giving me 60GB or so. I also guess that I can drastically reduce the / partition and reassign all that extra space to hda3. But is this even possible? Am I just asking for trouble? Should I start over and rebuild this computer from scratch (an incredibly annoying proposition)?

[huw-l]

Originally Posted by underpope

INow, I can happily resize my hda2 to 10GB or so and move the rest to hda3, giving me 60GB or so. I also guess that I can drastically reduce the / partition and reassign all that extra space to hda3. But is this even possible? Am I just asking for trouble? Should I start over and rebuild this computer from scratch (an incredibly annoying proposition)?

If you repartition the disk you lose all the data. If you were using Logical Volume Management (LVM) for all you partitions and hadn't assigned the whole disk you would now be able to use the LVM tools to increase the size of one of your partitions. If it were me I'd just buy another hard drive.

Another option is to mv some of your music directories to somewhere under / and symlink them back to their original locations. That way all your apps can still find them but they actually live on / using up some of that 63GB of space.

mv /var/Music/MusicFolder1 /NewMusicLocation/MusicFolder1
ln -s /NewMusicLocation/MusicFolder1 /var/Music/MusicFolder1

HTH