Mageia forum

Hi. On my primary disk I have two partitions:
- /, with 10'7 Gb, but I already occupied 9'8 Gb.
- /home, with 21'10 Gb, but I already occupied 20'8 Gb.

Therefore, there is no more free space to expand either.

On another NTFS disk I do have more space.

My question is: Can I move to that other disk some heavy folder like /usr or /var?

Well, in theory you can, but you can't do it online, and really would recommend to not move your linux directories to an NTFS disk, as NTFS with the default namespace does not support unix permissions natively.

In practice it would probably be easier to keep your /home partition, and then reinstall and create a bigger / partition, with at least 25-50 GB.

Ugh, reinstalling everything again is a discarded option because I spent weeks installing Mageia, installing and configuring the programs I need, uninstalling the leftovers ...

I understand that moving folders like /usr or /var to an NTFS partition can cause problems, that's why I wanted to ask before. But, what if on that 900 Gb NTFS partition I take out a new EXT partition, for Linux, and then I move some Linux folder there?

I 'think' there is a method to dd your / directory to a spare disk, repartition and copy back /, then expand that partition fully.

Sorry I'm in a hurry right now: But pretty sure that can be done. Hang around, or jump in IRC, someone should know how to do it in depth.

Perhaps have a read of this: https://colin.guthr.ie/2013/02/dances-with-laps/

Anything is generally possible with linux: Just takes knowing the right steps: Good luck

xboxboy wrote:I 'think' there is a method to dd your / directory to a spare disk, repartition and copy back /, then expand that partition fully.

Well, clonezilla can do that pretty easily if you're experienced.

Presumably the / partition is in front of home. At least, this is how the installer would configure it.

If that is true, I would backup /home, then blow off the home partition and use the space to extend /, which you can do without reinstalling and with very little pain using gparted.

Then, put your new /home on that other drive, stealing some of the ntfs space to make a new partition.

This will expand your / to about 30 GB which probably will be enough.

For the record, I did this exact thing last december on my workstation, when it became necessary to expand my 28GB / partition. It is now 53 GB, and the partition that was behind it is that much smaller. Using gparted, I did not even have to reboot.