HPR4348: Resizing the root partition on a PC

Hacker Public Radio

Background It all happened when I noticed that a disk space monitor sitting in the top right hand side on my Gnome desktop was red. On inspection I discovered that my root filesystem was 87% full. The root partition was only 37GB in size which meant there was less than 4GB of space left. When I thought back I remembered that my PC was running a bit slower than usual and that that the lack of space in the root partition could have been to blame. I had some tasks that I wanted to complete and thought I’d better do something about the lack of space before it became an even bigger problem. What happened As per usual all this happened when I was short of time and I was in a bit of a hurry. Lesson one don’t do this sort of thing when your in a bit of a hurry. Because I was in a hurry I didn’t spend time doing a complete backup. Lesson two do a backup. My plan was to get some space back by shrinking my home partition leaving some empty space to allow me to increase the size of my root partition. For speed and ease I decided to use Gparted as I have used this many times in the past. Wikipedia article about Gparted Official Gparted webpage It’s not a good idea to try and resize and or move a mounted filesystem so a bootable live version of Gparted would be a good idea. The reason for this is that if you run Gparted from your normal Linux OS and the OS decides to write something to the disk while Gparted is also trying to write or move things on the disk then as you could imagine very bad things could and probably would happen. I knew I had an old bootable live CDROM with Gparted on it as I had used this many times in the past though not for a few years. As I was short on time I thought this would be the quickest way to get the job done. I booted up the live CD and setup the various operations such as shrinking the home partitions, moving it to the right to leave space for the root partition then finally increasing the size of the almost full root partition. What I didn’t notice at the time is that there was a tiny explanation mark on at least one of the partitions. I probably missed this because I was in a hurry. Lesson three don’t rush things and be on the lookout for any error messages. When I clicked the green tick button to carry out the operations it briefly seemed to start and almost instantly stopped saying that there were errors and that the operation was unsuccessful and something about unsupported 64 bit filesystems. At this point I thought / hoped that nothing had actually happened. My guess was that the old live Gparted distribution I was using didn’t support Ext4 though I could be completely wrong on this. Lesson four don’t use old versions of Gparted particularly when performing operations on modern filesystems. Wikipedia article about the Ext4 filesystem I removed the Gparted bootable CD and rebooted my PC. At this point I got lots of errors scrolling up the screen I then got a message I’ve never see before from memory I think it said Journaling It then said something about pass 1 pass 2 pass 3 and continued all the way to 5. Then it talked about recovering data blocks. At this point I got very nervous. I had all sorts of fears going through my head. I imagined I may have lost all the contents of my hard-rive. The whole experience was very scary. I let it complete all operations an