[ubuntu-uk] ubuntu-uk Digest, Vol 61, Issue 71

[Matthew Daubney]

On Tue, 2010-05-25 at 15:35 +0100, Daniel Drummond wrote:
<snip>
> Actually Rowan, ask all the questions you want.  You are learning here.

This is very true.

> The livecd offers no benefits to the process, in fact using an up to
> date system, rather than an out-of-date livecd may be a better idea, if
> purely for any bugfixes that may be present in the up to date system.
> 
<snip>

This is an incredibly dangerous idea. When you're mucking around with
partitions it is very, _very_, UNsafe to have the _device_ mounted. 

Having been building storage systems for the past 8 months, I've dealt
with things in terrible states, one of the causes being people believing
that repartitioning with a volume mounted is a good idea.

Save yourself some grief, for the sake of downloading and creating a
live CD, you'll probably save yourself having to reinstall the whole
system. 

When I do this on customers machines the process is 
1. Boot Live CD (or in my case USB as it's a touch quicker)
2. Make backup of entire drive (overnight usually due to this being on
xxTB systems) onto some external storage
3. Use gparted to sort out partition
4. Check everything is fine, system boots, data is intact
5. Return system to customer
6. After a couple of weeks of no problems, remove the image.

This would obviously need to be modified for your needs. 

_DO_ backup your important data.
_DO NOT_ repartition a mounted device

Using a liveCD provides you with a clean environment. There is far less
that can go wrong.

Just my 2p worth of course. But taking time to do things properly is
usually far quicker than having to undo things done badly.

-Matt Daubney