Argthtjtr

I purchased a 240G remote server and it has no control panel to change the way the server is partitioned so my root folder is locked to 20G. I have looked through many pages of google results and finally caved to ask here.

Filesystem       Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

udev              16G     0   16G   0% /dev

tmpfs            3.2G  1.3M  3.2G   1% /run

/dev/sda2         20G  3.7G   15G  21% /

tmpfs             16G     0   16G   0% /dev/shm

tmpfs            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock

tmpfs             16G     0   16G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup

/dev/sda1        487M   79M  379M  18% /boot

/dev/sda3        200G   60M  190G   1% /home

I would like for the root to be larger than my home dir because thats where my programs are installed and use the space.

1. make a backup of home.


2. umount home.


3. Use a partitioning tool to shrink or delete and recreate a smaller home.


4. Create and mount a new partition (parted is a command line tool)

If you can install vncserver and connect remotely you can install and use gparted.

Notes: changing the root volume when its mounted is either not permitted or only permitted with a small number of file systems.

Alternatives:

pretend sda3 is home

    sda4 is new partition

5. mount /dev/sda4 /temp

Now say the /usr folder is causing your root to be full.

As a precaution your should probably stop all or as many as possible running services.

6. cp -r /usr /temp


7. mv usr usr.old


8. umount /temp


9. mount /dev/sda4 /usr

verify that the contents match

Restart all services, as needed

modify /etc/fstab and or /etc/mtab as needed so the new partition automatically mounts on reboot.

Alternatively if your distro has a GUI tool feel free to use that.

reboot

If everything is correct delete usr.old

Technically you could copy all the files to your new partition. Then edit fstab and mtab so / points to /dev/sda4 and mount /dev/sda1 to a harmless folder like /useless. After rebooting and verifying everything still works you could delete or not mount /useless or maybe reuse it for something else like /var or /var/log.

Here's some commands I got from the website I listed in the comments.

gparted

print

select /dev/sda3

#delete home

rm 3 (or whatever print tells you the partition number is

mkpart

primary

file system? whatever you want

start? don't know

end? don't know 20gb more that the start?

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3  (change the filesystem to whatever)

mkpart

primary

file system? whatever you want

start? don't know

end? don't know 100gb (or etc)more that the start?

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4  (change the filesystem to whatever)