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

[Daniel Drummond]

On Tue, 2010-05-25 at 19:05 +0100, Matthew Daubney wrote:
> 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 date system, rather than an out-of-date livecd may be a better idea, if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

Never caused any problems for me.  In fact some filesystems need to
mounted in order to resize them (xfs for one).  


Dan