resizing partitions (was: Did I stump the band?)

[Robert Citek <rwcitek@alum.calberkeley.org>]

On Monday, Mar 28, 2005, at 17:37 US/Central, Robert G. (Doc) Savage 
wrote:

> On Mon, 2005-03-28 at 01:57 -0600, Robert Citek wrote:
>> I also recommend using qtparted.
>
> I'd like to, but it's not part of RHEH4.

Any reason you can't boot Knoppix?

>> Oh, and make a backup of your original data ... just in case.
>
> Uhhh.... Fine idea, but that'd be like moving Bandini Mountain. I
> already have 434GB of forensic data on that filesystem. Any attempt to
> back that up to tape and verify it would take several days -- if not
> weeks -- assuming I had that many DDS-3 tapes (which I don't). I'm
> hoping affordable 25GB blu-ray DVD-Rs become available "soon".

You don't need tapes.  This would be as a safety net, not a historical 
archive.  Three 250 GB external USB2/FW drives would work.  RAID 5 them 
together, start imaging the original drive (dd if=/dev/hdb 
of=/mnt/raid5.fw/backup.img) right before bed time, and then go to 
sleep.  500 GB @ 17 MB/s ~ 500 minutes ~ 8 hours.  You'll awake with a 
complete image.  You can then resize the original partition with 
confidence.  BTW, on a partition that big resizing the partition, 
resizing the filesystem, and checking the filesystem will probably take 
you a whole day, too.

Again, you probably will want to play with a smaller partition on a 
spare drive just to get the feel for parted and its quirks.  For 
example, specifying 500 GB may mean the resulting partition is actually 
498.832 GB.

In any case, let us know how things go.

Regards,
- Robert
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