Dale, I highly recommend gparted - its FAR less likely you will make a
mistake. Practise on a usb stick first if you need confirmation.
gparted handles file system creation and in some cases data movement.
ie, think of it as creating a script that you approve before pressing
go. You can queue up commands like move this partiion (including data)
to the end of the disk , delete that partition, extend another
partition (moving data if needed) to fill up half the free space.
Create a new partition and format it as btrfs. Check that it looks good
(visualisation and any errors highlighted) and press go!
This is one case where the visualisation and protection for shooting
yourself in the foot can be worth its weight in gold!
BillK
On 15/3/26 02:33, Dale wrote:
On 3/14/26 12:10 PM, Michael wrote:
On Saturday, 14 March 2026 14:06:41 Greenwich Mean Time Dale wrote:
Howdy,
As some know, on my old and new rig, I compile my updates in a chroot
environment. Then I copy the binaries over and use the -k option on
my running OS. That way I don't have a crash when one program is
updated and another it depends on is not yet updated. Anyway, my
chroot is getting squeezed a little. I need to expand it another
30GBs or so so that I don't get not enough space errors. It's only
the largest packages right now but the next larger ones are growing
and will start having issues as well. I have a m.2 stick for my OS.
It's a 1TB stick. I have plenty of space unused. I did the OS first
and then did a partition for the chroot thingy. The partition named
build-part is the chroot. The parts above it are the OS. This is the
current layout.
Part. # Size Partition Type Partition Name
----------------------------------------------------------------
1007.0 KiB free space
1 2.0 GiB EFI system partition efi-part
2 10.0 GiB Linux filesystem boot
3 400.0 GiB Linux filesystem root-part
4 180.0 GiB Linux filesystem var-part
5 150.0 GiB Linux filesystem build-part
189.5 GiB free space
I think I can just delete the partition for build-part and then add a
new partition that is larger, then do a file system and rsync the
files back over.
Yes, you could delete and recreate the last partition in the table, but
this sounds like a lot of extra (unnecessary) work.
My question, thing I want to be sure of, if I
delete that and re-add it, that will not affect my OS at all? Right?
I may do a back up first but still, I'd like to be sure this is at
least doable and not risky.
Any interaction with partitions can result in loss of data, so a fresh
backup at least of the partition table before you start any resizing/
deleting/creating partitions is advisable.
I'll be using cgdisk and the usual file
system tools for this. I'm assuming I'll have to recreate the file
system and such.
Thanks in advance.
Dale
:-) :-)
I suggest you unmount partition 5, then use parted (or if you prefer a
GUI try gparted, or the KDE Partition Manager) to resize the end point
of it. If you use parted on the CLI you will additionally need to
increase the size of the filesystem within the partition after the
partition has been resized.
Well, this turned out to be easy enough. I thought I'd check out
gparted. After all, if I only look, it doesn't do anything, I guess.
When I opened it up, it had a triangle next to part 5. I right
clicked and found a option for more info. It said some of the
partition was not formatted. No idea how that happened since I
haven't touched the partitions since I built this rig. It said for me
to run a 'check' on it. So, I told it too. Well, I selected for it
to do it. It took me a minute to realize I had to tell it to actually
go do it. Once I hit the 'apply' button, it resized the file system
and then it was big enough. At least I think it grew. This is what it
shows now.
FILESYSTEM USED %USED USED AVAILABLE TOTAL MOUNTED ON
/dev/nvme0n1p5 61.5% 83.0G 56.6G 147.1G
/mnt/build-sys
I kinda edited that a little so it hopefully won't line wrap. I'm
pretty sure that before the available space was only like 20GBs or
less. Anyway, I'll see how 56GBs works. It'll be next weekend tho.
If it's not large enough, I'll make it bigger then. :-D
I think I used gparted before. It kinda looked familiar but I could
have just read about it and installed it to take a look see. Anyway,
it may have did the job. We'll will see.
Thanks again to all.
Dale
:-) :-)
