Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

The DVD editing partition is mounted at /mnt/edit. It’s an ext3 file system. To back it up, I put in a DVD+RW, changed to /mnt and ran growisofs -M /dev/dvd -R -J edit. About 20 minutes later, the 3.7GB was backed up.

Parted is supposed to be able to resize an ext3 file system, but version 1.6.3 complains No Implementation: This ext2 filesystem has a rather strange layout! Parted can’t resize this (yet). This is strange because print shows the system to be ext3. Mm-kay. I remember reading that it’s easy to switch between ext2 and ext3 and found the following commands to do so:

ext3 -> ext2: tune2fs -O '^has_journal' /dev/hdb2

ext2 -> ext3: tune2fs -j /dev/hdb2

Alas, parted still complained about the partition in its ext2 incarnation. Some Googling turned up references to this error as an unresolved Parted issue due to Parted using an old version of ext2resize. The recommendation is to use the utility directly. So I downloaded and installed (rpm -Uvh) ext2resize-1.1.17-1.i386.rpm from the ext2resize site. The man page for ext2resize says it only resizes the file system, not the partion. To resize the partion, you should delete and recreate it with fdisk making sure you use the same starting position. Hey, I made a backup, right? On exit of fdisk, it said there was a problem reloading the partition table and the kernel would use the old one. Time for a reboot.

So far, so good. Next command is ext2resize /dev/hdb2 which will resize the file system to fill the partition (now about 104GB). No errors. Converted back to ext3 and mounted. Touchdown!