Increase size of existing Kubuntu partition?

[ScottyK]

My computer is dual booting Vista and Kubuntu 10.04. The Vista OS sits on it's own hard drive (640 GB), and Kubuntu has half of another hard drive (500 GB).

For some reason the 500 GB hard drive will frequently "disappear" when running Vista. Formatting, changing cables, etc will not solve it. The only way to get the hard drive "back" is to do a cold restart.

Under Kubuntu, that hard drive has no problems.

When I first set up Kubuntu, I gave it 1/2 of the 500GB drive. However since the drive is useless under Vista, I'd like to give Kubuntu the entire drive.

How do I go about doing this? I thought about going into Vista and deleting the Vista partition on that 500 GB, then resize the "unknown" OS partition and grab the entire drive.

Thanks!

[oshunluvr]

Re: Increase size of existing Kubuntu partition?

Several ways to do this:

1. Boot to a live gparted CD, remove the unwanted partition and resize the other.

2. Leave the partition table alone and reformat it to a linux format of your choice and mount it for use as is.

3. Consider an alternate approach: Setting up your system to be a more secure and reliable system.

This last choice would involve resizing and repartitioning the drive to have separate partitions for /home, /tmp, additional space for a parallel install and backup partitions.

500gb is way more space than any linux install would ever need. In your case: you are essentially a single drive system. At the most basic level you can easily move /home to a different partition, reduce your install partition to 12gb, create a duplicate partition of your install, create a third install partition for future "clean" installs, create a stand-alone /tmp partition, create a file backup partition for critical data.

At a more advance level, a separate grub partition can be useful.

All of this would serve to protect you against a broken update or accidentally breakage of your linux install by a user. Having a separate /home is always a good idea.

At and even more advanced level, you can enhance and protect your system even more by using a small part of your other drive as well.

I'll stop here for now -

p.s. Any luck figuring out why Vista is dropping the drive? Look at the hardware first (cables, check the drive for problems), check bios settings and look into a possible bios update,

[ScottyK]

Re: Increase size of existing Kubuntu partition?

I like option 1, seems easiest!

I know 500GB is overkill, but since the drive isn't dependable in Windows 7/Vista, it's useless for a Microsoft OS.

But as I read your suggestion about creating a couple different partitions for the /home and /tmp directories, it makes sense and I might do that.

I've reformated the drive, checked the drive for errors, didn't work. Next is a BIOS update (if necessary) and order a new round of cables from Newegg.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Increase size of existing Kubuntu partition?

You might want to install smartmontools in linux and look at the smart output of the drive too - might be having issues there that vista objects too.