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 date system, rather than an out-of-date livecd may be a better idea, if 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 -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
