topic Re: Enlarge Partition in Operating System - Linux

Enlarge Partition

Tony500 — Wed, 18 Sep 2002 18:44:24 GMT

My system has two harddrives and is set for dual boot. The first harddrive is a Windows drive. The second drive has both a Dos partition and my Linux partition on it. What I want to do is get rid of the Dos partition from the second drive all together and enlarge the Linux partition to use the whole second drive without having to re-install. Is this possible?
I have Mandrake Linux 8.1

Re: Enlarge Partition

Donald Kok — Thu, 19 Sep 2002 04:55:13 GMT

The simple option:
mount the dos partition somewhere under your filesystem, and wipe it clean (rm -r *).

the more difficult option:
use fdisk (or sfdisk) to remove the dos (=fat) partition and make a real linux partition (ext2 or ext3). And again mount this under your current filesystem.

Re: Enlarge Partition

Jochen Heuer — Thu, 19 Sep 2002 07:02:15 GMT

Hello!

Another possibility is to use 'parted', see http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/

This software can resize partitions. But this only works if your Linux partition is before the DOS partitions since during resize the start of the partition has to stay fixed.

If your DOS partition comes first you can only create a Linux filesystem on the partition and mount it somewhere in your filesystem (change partition type for this partition with fdisk and put filesystem on it with e.g. mke2fs).