I recently installed Ubuntu linux, and everything came up working fine. Then Ubuntu wanted to install “system updates” (all packages that have had updates since version 6.0.6 was released), so I let it go ahead and download the 200 MB of upgrades. One of those upgrades was a new linux kernel (2.6.15-28, vs. my current 2.6.15-26). To “install” this upgrade, Ubuntu attempted to write the new kernel into my \/boot partition. Which lacked enough space. “Write error!” Ubuntu declared, leaving half of a kernel stuck to the end of the partition. I cleaned this off, happy to stay with my current kernel, but then I wondered. Would I ever be able to upgrade my kernel? Maybe 16 MB was too small for \/boot. (Kernels are getting large and fat these days!)<\/p>\n
After hashing this over with some friends, the solution seemed straightforward. I decided to stretch \/boot out to cover 128 MB — plenty of space for several kernels and all of their friends. Now, partitions are physical divisions of your hard drive, so their position matters. My 16-MB \/boot partition was first on the disk, followed by my 5-GB \/ partition (less than 1 GB used). Therefore, I planned to save a full copy of \/boot and \/, modify both partitions, then copy my data back onto the partitions.<\/p>\n
After making and checking my full copy of this data, I turned to some man pages to acquaint myself with fdisk<\/tt> for the partitioning rite. Here’s where I learned something: there is a utility, parted<\/tt>, that will permit you to move<\/i> and resize<\/i> partitions! (For you geeks, this “resize” applies to both the partition and the filesystem, which is what does the trick.) Instead of destroying and re-creating them, saving and copying data, in theory<\/i> I could simply shuffle them around. In theory<\/I>, this is all I would need to do:<\/p>\n \n\/dev\/hda5 goes from 65kB to 16MB In reality<\/i>, parted<\/tt> had some tricks up its sleeve. It flat-out refused to move partition 6 anywhere above 17MB. (“Error: unable to satisfy all constraints on the partition.”) I still am not sure exactly what those constraints were, but in the end, here’s what worked:<\/p>\n Now I have that same post-puzzle fatigue-glow that you get after escaping Zork’s maze of twisty little passages. Puzzle completed in 6 steps. I could have done it in 5 if I’d known that I’d need to shrink partition 6 down to 1000MB from the start. Thank goodness \/ gave me 5 GB to mess around in — and that the shrinking steps succeeded! After rebooting, I’m back up and running, with 120 MB on \/boot (not 128, possibly because partitions like to start and stop on cylinder boundaries?). Done! And I can delete that backup copy I made and never needed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently installed Ubuntu linux, and everything came up working fine. Then Ubuntu wanted to install “system updates” (all packages that have had updates since version 6.0.6 was released), so I let it go ahead and download the 200 MB of upgrades. One of those upgrades was a new linux kernel (2.6.15-28, vs. my current […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\/dev\/hda6 goes from 16MB to 5256MB
\nSo…<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
# move and shrink \/dev\/hda6, which is \/, to start at 128MB\n
# move and grow \/dev\/hda5, which is \/boot, to end at 128MB
\n<\/tt><\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
<\/p>\n
# really, it's mostly empty. This was safe. I hoped.\n
# get partition 6 out of the way. Note that I couldn't just move it to start at 128MB because you \"can't move a partition to overlap with itself\" and it ended at 2000 MB.\n
# grow partition 5\n
# parted won't let me resize 6 back down to start at 128 MB. I can't move it there, either, because (you guessed it) it would overlap with its current position. So I had to shrink it again.\n
# now I can move it down!\n
# and make it bigger.
\n<\/tt>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n