Resize+Move root and home partitions with GParted on the same drive

[gold_finger]

Short Answer:  Everything will probably be okay -- but always a possibility when manipulating partitions that something could go wrong, (especially when moving Root partition).


No matter what you end up doing, make sure you have backup copy of anything important that you don't want to lose.


Long Answer:  Home partition should be fine, but sometimes (more commonly on older computers) having Root so far from beginning of drive may cause system not to boot properly.  If not too much trouble, might be better to change order of partitions to Swap/Root/Home instead of current Swap/Home/Root.  Also, you should not need to have Root partition bigger than it already is (26.7GiB); so any bigger than that would just be a waste of space.  Run this command from a terminal and look at the current "used" space of "/" (root).  It's likely only using between 5-8GB of current available space in root partition.  Even if you installed another 100 programs to LL it wouldn't use up rest of space in Root.


EDIT (Inserted several days later because I see that I forgot to include command that I referred to in above paragraph).  Here is the command I was referring to above:

Code:

df -h

To change order of partitions, you have two choices -- one much easier than the other (if you're relatively new to Linux and/or not particularly comfortable using the terminal).


Easiest:

• Boot from live LL USB/DVD, use GParted to delete current Root partition, move Home partition to right leaving approximately 25GB space between it and Swap partition.  Then make new ext4 formatted partition in that space (to serve as new Root partition).
  
• Expand Home partition to end of disk.  (Now you'll have small Swap and Home followed by large Home partition.)
  
• Once that's done, close GParted and start installer.  Choose "Something Else" (manual) install method.
  
• Set new 25GB partition as Root (with mount point "/"), check box to format the partition.
  
• Set old Home partition as new Home (with mount point "/home"), but DO NOT format the partition.
  
• Installer will automatically setup swap, no need to manually do anything with that partition.
  
• Finish install (use same username as you had on old install) and you'll have new system with all data in Home still there.
  
• Downside to this is you'll need to re-install any additional programs you may have installed to LL before.
  

Harder:

• Boot with live LL USB/DVD, use GParted to move Home to right by approximately 27-28GB.  Cut/Copy/Paste Root partition from end of drive into free space now between Swap and Home.
  
• Use series of terminal commands to chroot into moved Root partition, make edits to fstab file and re-install grub to MBR of drive.
  
• Time wise this will probably take just as long or longer to do than easy method above.
  
• Pro to this is you won't have to re-install additional programs you might have added to LL.
  
• P.s.  I've not done this myself, but (in theory) it should work and I could provide instructions if you have a strong aversion to re-installing.