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Accepted
Antonello
Asked: 2013-04-10 01:48:43 +0800 CST

How to shrink an ext4 /home partition without using a LiveCD and losing data?

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I need to shrink an ext4 /home partition (/dev/sda9) to make space for something else.

I would prefer avoid live CDs (boot troubles with new EFI and. I don't have a CD/USB in hand in the office).

I can boot as root directly to command line so I can unmount /home but then, for some reasons, I can't use the GUI even for the root user, so I can't use GParted.

Is there a terminal command to resize an unmounted ext4 partition without losing data ?

12.10

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Just comment out the corresponding line in /etc/fstab, reboot into recovery mode and make shure that /home/$your_user exists and has the correct permissions (mkdir -p /home/$your_user && chown $your_user:$your_user /home/$your_user). Reboot and you can use the GUI to shrink the partition.

    The terminal command for EXT filesystems is resize2fs, depending on the partition table you have to use different tools to resize the partition (e.g. fdisk or gdisk), but I would recommend using the GUI.

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