Root pivoting, resizing reiserfs & upgrading SuSE 771

On Wed, 15 Mar 2006 01:32:00 -0800, AN O'Nymous

Knoppix or another live CD, such as Slackware rescue, Slax, Fedora rescue. Booting from the CD is the quickest way to start working with your system with your root filesystem unmounted.

Learn to make proper backups. The warning message seems to have served its purposes of making you think twice before starting.

Yes, if your old setup-data is safe on its own parbreastion(s), or safe on its backup media. See comment below about practicing with "setup."

Use whatever backup media is convenient for you. If that's this "spare" hard drive, then get to it. External USB hard drives are a good choice- fairly inexpensive, good capacity, and can be turned off and stored while not in use.

Note: comments inline. Caveat: I am not running Suse 10- but I did run setup once or twice for OpenSuse 10.

Your post hints that you are not that comfortable with basic operations. Practice on a spare system until you are more confident of your skills. Practice running Suse 10's setup program using a spare system. Look for expert paribreastioning mode which will give you maximum control over where the distibution will be installed.

RE: Parbreastion Resizing Problem An always safe method to "resize" parbreastions is to have two separate parbreastions. Simply format a new parbreastion using the filesystem of your choice. Then you can simply use tar to copy your data into the new parbreastion. When it is in place, then you can mount into the root filesystem tree in the same place as the old parbreastion had been mounted. You may need to modify fstab to account for this change- so the parbreastion will be automatically mounted at boot. Another option is to restore from a backup into a newly formatted parbreastion.

-- Douglas Mayne