Announcement

**dibl** · Oct 23, 2007, 04:55 AM

Re: Partition problems again - and running out of space soon

Long time waiting -- no reply.

You asked for "detailed steps", but it strikes me you need to step back and maybe consider the bigger picture first. You are trying to squeeze the last 3% out of this 60GB hard drive with a revision of this particular partitioning scheme, with no backup method available for your valuable data, and yet

It controls 2 hard drives and the partitions and various flavors of Kubuntu on them.

So, you're running 2 hdds, and some multiple number of OSs. What is your real objective with this system, over the longer term? Why are you so intent on cramming this hdd full to the point that there is zero growth potential? I'm sure you know that large hard drives are available for USD $0.32 per gigabyte:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136053

So, if I were you and had the problem that you described, I would buy that 320GB WD hard drive, plug it in to my system in lieu of whatever the second hard drive is that you didn't tell us about, and boot a GParted Live CD obtained from here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...kage_id=173828

I would partition my new drive appropriately for whatever my purpose was, maybe make a "My Data" partition on it that all my OS's could access, then copy the valuable stuff into that, and then proceed to reconfigure my system to suit my plan.

As far as relieving your immediate crisis for the VERY short term, make a swap partition on your other hard drive, edit /etc/fstab to use the new swap partition, then you can delete /dev/hda4 on this drive, leaving you with only 3 primary partitions on this overburdened drive, and a wee bit of flexibility to adjust the remaining partitions such that, at the end of moving them all, /dev/hda1 gets to add both the 300MB and the 1.9GB from /dev/hda3.

**kubicle** · Oct 23, 2007, 05:14 AM

Re: Partition problems again - and running out of space soon

For immediate space issues, you can try clearing the package cache of old packages:

Code:

sudo apt-get autoclean

or all packages

Code:

sudo apt-get clean

The package cache (/var/cache/apt/archives/) can amount to quite a bit, especially after a full version upgrade.

**Fintan** · Oct 23, 2007, 06:14 AM

Re: Partition problems again - and running out of space soon

Code:

sudo apt-get autoclean

or all packages

Code:

sudo apt-get clean

Will probably help a bit but I have to also agree with dible. Get yourself a new HD make a separate data partition. This makes sense for a lot of logical reasons not the least of which is data safety

I went through the same ordeal not to long ago so I feel for you.
A word of reason. Before starting I would get to know all I can about uuid's (there is plenty about that here on this forum) and your fstab editing.

Repartitioning / moving partition and or resizing / merging, etc will definitely screw up your fstab, /boot/grub/menu.lst and corresponding uuid's.

Just a few questions:

How much data would you be moving / saving / backing up?

Can't you burn a few Data DVD's?

For online data storage you can use this:
[url=http://[url=http://www.xdrive.com/]http://www.xdrive.com/]http://www.xd...drive.com/</a>
the first 5Gig are free.

A further suggestion would be to get aptoncd:
http://aptoncd.sourceforge.net/
and use that to backup all the apps on your main linux (before you upgrade) so you can do a fresh install of your current system after do your partitioning fun and reinstall all of the apps you had before. That will keep you from spending a lot of time getting your menu.lst, fstab back in oder.

As for a step by step there is a lot of very good documentation on the gparted link dible gave you. Have a look there as well.

As far your partitions are concerned leave one primary (for your main linux) and change the rest into logical partitions. You can do this with gparted as well.

I hope this helps you along a bit.

**PJJ** · Oct 23, 2007, 11:05 AM

Re: Partition problems again - and running out of space soon

dibl -
kubicle -
Fintan -

Thank you all for your prompt and valuable replies. I will use them to resolve this problem.

As usual, I did assume too much, i.e. I sort of expected you guys to know what I did not mention in my post;

I have 2 HD because I used to dual boot Linux and Windows.
My Linux drive has Dapper Drake and Gutsy as OS.
The former Windows drive has another Gutsy, up-to-date and working beautifully..

Most of the partitions on the drive do not hold a lot of data., except for the (ex - Windows) partition hda1.

The ultimate solution is what dibl suggested.
Temporary fix:
How about backing up/saving all data on hda to CD or offsite/remote backup and Then a format, re-partition of hda before clean installation of a copy of Gutsy?

That should eliminate the fstab confusion.

Correct?
Any suggestions for offsite backup?
I know of Carboncopy (Windsows only)
Tried rsync (without real success).

**PJJ** · Oct 28, 2007, 02:45 PM

Re: Partition problems again - and running out of space soon

I managed to resolve the problem along the lines of the suggestions above. thanks again for contributing.

Here is how I did it:

I finally remembered that I can upload data to our host server.
Uploaded all data files to server via ftp.

Used fdisk (on Freedos) to repartition hard drive number 1 with only 2 new partitions..
Gparted to format partition.

Re-installed Kubuntu 7.10 (after fresh download of image) as a clean install.

Downloaded data files to the second of the new partitions.

Everything is working just fine now. this is essentially a variation of dible's suggestion.

Next, I will do the same to hard drive 2 -except that I will re-install Dapper Drake, which I keep as the always working, always reliable fallback in case the adventures with 7.10 hit a sang.

Thanks again.

Announcement

Partition problems again - and running out of space soon

Partition problems again - and running out of space soon

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment