[clue-tech] increase root part after install?

[David L. Anselmi]

Mike Bean wrote:
> The group told me once that I shouldn't ever have to reformat, made me think
> to ask first.
>
> Currently I'm running 10G root, 250mb boot, 4GB swap. 485 GB home.
[...]
> Well, I guess, I'm asking for advice on the most efficient manner to
> increase root.
>
> @fozzie:~/Dropbox/bin/scripts$ df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda1             9.2G  4.8G  4.0G  55% /
> /dev/sda4             446G  120G  303G  29% /home

I don't see /boot.  Perhaps it's sda2, with sda3 for swap.  So here's the difficulty: to get more 
space for sda1 you have to slide 2 and 3 to the right along with the front of sda4.

Typical tools can cut space off the end of a device but moving the beginning is difficult (the 
beginning has important file system meta-data as well as lots of data).

Probably gparted can do this because it seems to be smart enough to move all the blocks and fix up 
the file systems but it would have to move at least 12GB (in this case) of /home data so that kind 
of operation tends to be slow.

It's much easier to put the whole disk in an LVM PV and then make LVs for your file systems.  Then 
you can put your blocks where you want them without caring where they are on disk.

Some people may tell you that LVM is scary and over-complicates your disk but I don't think so. 
I've always been able to find a recipe for what I wanted to do with it.  And it's supported by grub2 
so you can stop fooling with LILO silliness and put /boot on LVM too.  LVM is well worth learning.

Dave