XFS resizing & Win2k

[Andrew Mathews]

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Net Llama! wrote:
| I've painted myself into a corner where i need/want to turn a Linux only
| box into a dual boot box with Win2k.  Right now, the box (which is a
| laptop) has just RH9 (XFS) installed, and occupying the entire disk as
| follows:
| hda1  /boot
| hda2  SWAP
| hda3 /
|
| What I need to do is resize hda3 so that its about 5 GB smaller, so that i
| can create a hda4 to install Win2k on.  The problem here is that
| xfs_growfs doesn't appear to support shrinking partitions, just growing
| them.  Is shrinking an XFS partition even possible?  If so, how?
|
| thanks!
|

Nope. It's a one way street, as is LVM. AFAIK, no filesystem supports
shrinking, at least I haven't found a way with AIX, Solaris, IRIX, or
any others. The easiest way is to xfsdump the mountpoint, drop it and
recreate it with the size required, and xfsrestore the data. You can do
this with the installer iso by entering rescue mode, mounting /dev/hda3
as a temporary mountpoint and chrooting to the mountpoint. A tape drive
would be handy for this as you won't be able to mount anything via nfs
since networking won't be available. You'll also need to do this after
installing Windows to be able to rerun lilo, otherwise Win will be the
only thing that's bootable. Also see:
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html#resizexfspartition

- --
Andrew Mathews
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