Re: apologies for my ignorance

[Phil Williams]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2002 at 06:58:41PM -0400, David Leuser II wrote:
> I would REALLY REALLY appreciate it if any wise linux gurus could take me
> under your wing...

I'm sorry, I'm no guru.  Trust anything I write here appropriately ;-)

> I want to grow /home (Minor #2) by 4.5 gb.  I was thinking I would resize
> /usr (minor #5) to be smaller (change the end from 10260 to 5760) to get
> the space to do this.  That's when i rebooted and got nasty errors i
> didn't understand, resized it back, and breathed a sigh of relief at my
> good luck that fixed it... But now I don't know what to do? Whilst trying
> to resize, partent was spitting scary warnings at me like 'failed to
> cleanly unmount' or something to that effect.

It sounds like you were trying to use Parted to resize a partition containing
a file system that was still mounted.  In other words, you tried to resize a
partition that Linux (the kernel) was allowed to write to.  As you'd expect,
that's not a good idea.

So you must first unmount the file system on that device using a command like:

        # umount /usr

But since /usr is such an important and frequently used part of the system, I
think you'll actually be better off running Parted from a boot disk (in fact,
you might not really have a choice).  That way you can run Parted on the machine
with none of the file systems on your server's disks being mounted at the time.

See the Parted manual http://www.gnu.org/manual/parted-1.6.1/ for more
information.  Actually, from memory, I think the section on creating a boot disk
is out of date and that you need to create two disks, a root disk and a boot
disk.  There is more information to be found at the FTP site mentioned in that
section.

Phil.