[NTLUG:Discuss] Resizing Linux partitions

[Leroy Tennison]

Decided to try this since I needed a CentOS installation and would have 
enough room on a hard drive if I shrunk a couple of existing 
installations.  Read about 'move' and 'resize' in parted but ran into 
issues.

First you can't make these modifications to a mounted partition so I 
tried 'linux rescue' using CentOS but it mounted the partition and I 
couldn't figure out how to  get it "un-busy" to dismount it.  Then I 
tried using the CD in "install mode" toggling over to a command prompt 
on the first screen.  This seemed successful until parted complained 
about "incompatible features enabled".

Googled and found that has_journal and dir_index were problem features 
so I removed them with tune2fs and ran e2fsck -fD afterward (as the 
posting indicated).  Still got the same message.  Found another posting 
about sparse_super and resize_inode so I removed sparse_super.  However, 
when I went to e2fsck the partition afterward it hung.

Bottom line: I trashed the partition.

No big deal since is was a test partition anyway, just some time 
wasted.  However, I am now very curious as to how you are supposed to go 
about resizing both ext3 and reiserfs partitions.  Anyone have good 
success with this using any non-commercial program?