Fixing disk partitions in preparation for upgrade

Kayvan A. Sylvan kayvan at sylvan.com
Mon Apr 17 18:20:17 UTC 2006


Hi everyone,

Over the weekend, I tried to upgrade my Redhat FC4 system to FC5 with
the Redhat FC5 DVD.

All went well, until the installer tried to copy the disk image
to the local disk and ran out of space.

Apparently, my / partition is too small and could not accomodate
the installer files. Here's what my partitions look like:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0                209922     30473    168611  16% /boot
/dev/md1               1019144    800028    166508  83% /
/dev/md2              10153912   7896628   1733172  83% /usr
/dev/md3              10153912   2173160   7456640  23% /var
/dev/md4              91013072   7674312  78640960   9% /home

So, I need to resize some partitions. I tried to use "parted" to resize and
move some partitions around, but it looks like that won't work. The
parted error message is "Filesystem has incompatible features enabled" 

Redhat Bugzilla bug 90894 seems to imply that this is a parted problem,
having to do with SELinux and the ext_attr flag in the ext3 filesystems.

So, using "parted" to resize/move partitions is now out of the question
(till the bug gets fixed) and I don't want to remove the ext_attr
information from my filesystems. So, I would like some advice on how to
best proceed.

1) If I use dump/restore to dump and restore the filesystem, will all
   the attributes be restored (i.e. the SELinux/ext_attr/ACL information)?

2) Can I simply break the RAID1 array, repartition the first disk from
   scratch and copy all the information back from the second disk (using
   "cp" or some other utility that will preserve the ext_attr flags)?
   What would be the best procedure to do this?

Ultimately, my goal would be to combine the / and /usr filesystems and
to grow the resulting filesystem by 20GB (borrowing from /home).

-- 
Kayvan A. Sylvan          | Proud husband of       | Father to my kids:
Sylvan Associates, Inc.   | Laura Isabella Sylvan, | Katherine Yelena (8/8/89)
http://sylvan.com/~kayvan | my beautiful Queen.    | Robin Gregory (2/28/92)




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