I've two closely related questions, so I'll keep them in one SF question:
Question 1
I've a Linux (debian) server that must have minimal downtime. The disk has two partitions, one is /
(ext3) and one is swap. I'd like to move /home
to its own partition as it was originally for some reason built with everything in one partition; I however don't want to take the machine down for multiple minutes to resize the disk and create a new partition.
Is it possible for me to resize /
while its in use?
Question 2
I'd like to reinstall this same server eventually. Once again, without downtime. Once I've resized the disk using the answer provided to Question 1, can I somehow install on a new partition while the original system is still online. So I can simply reboot into the new OS and delete the old OS partition and resize the new partition to takeover the space of the old now delete partition.
Thanks for your responses to this somewhat weird question, unpleasantly I'm a tad short of servers for this particular project. I unfortunately suspect this cannot be done but thought I best check before drawing my conclusions.
Some notes and questions:
- Perhaps there are possible solution might be for me to boot into a network hosted kernel somehow?
- A second disk isn't possible, this machine is unfortunately in a very inflexible hosting provider.
- Would getting rid of the swap temporarily make this possible? That would give me 2GB unpartitioned space to play with.