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

[Matthew Daubney]

On Tue, 2010-05-25 at 20:57 +0100, Daniel Drummond wrote:
> 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 date system, rather than an out-of-date livecd may be a better idea, if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

XFS does do online resizing. However, it's the exception rather than the
rule, and it's still _very_ dangerous. Anything that could damage your
data should be done in a clean environment with as little background
processes running as possible.

-Matt Daubney