Answers to: Partitioning Troubles - Resize Operation Has Been Aborted

Answer by nanodiamond

nanodiamond — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:21:06 -0400

I think "Ignore" was a mistake. I agree with Ron -- and I never resize a primary partition anymore -- this is what LVM is for; also, don't upgrade, but do a clean install. pmarini could be correct. best wishes. (I apologise for being nonconstructive today) Suggestion: Either go with superos 9.10 or try the new 2010 PCLXDE and let me know what you think of it!

Answer by Ron

Ron — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:46:26 -0400

What follows is personal opinion based on experience.

Resizing partitions is never a smooth process - even if it appears so. It's never ideal, and never as good as just deleting the partition, re-partitioning and then reformatting the drive. Ideally, you should have a 1:1 ratio, meaning 1 physical hard drive = 1 partition. Using "hard" partitions like this is deal compared to using "soft" partitions.

Of course all of the above falls under the idealistic "Best Practices" methodology. Even I don't have a separate hard drive for /var, and another for / and another for /etc and so forth, so I think somewhere in the middle is best.

For a desktop PC, have 1 hard drive for / /etc /var and so forth, and then have another hard drive for /home. Make sure that both hard drives are big enough and you won't need to expand them in the future. In your current situation, I recommend the same as pmarini to get your data backed up, then do what I suggest above for a desktop PC. getting your data is important, but the real key is to not do this again, in order to prevent it from happening.

Also, Ubuntu 10.04LTS installs ext4 as the default file system, so I don't know if that would havething to do with it, vs say with an ext3, would you have the same issue?

Answer by pmarini

pmarini — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 05:49:36 -0400

a couple of ideas for your problem:

1) boot from a LiveCD (the Jaunty one should also do - choose "try without installing"), then plug an external USB drive and backup your data. you might need to manually mount the other (Karmic) but it just takes a second - come back to me if you need more details on how to do it

2) boot from a LiveCD and use GParted to repartition. in my experience all resizing will keep the existing data, but read the manual just to make sure. then you can reboot and reinstall. GParted is also available on its own ISO image or on the SystemRescueCD one