Fedora Linux 10 Partitioning

Okay, so I had my Fedora 10 system running out of disk space a few days ago, so I started looking for solutions to re-partition my hard drive. Yeah, GParted seemed like a good one, but it hasn’t got the power to resize currently mounted partitions, nor to run batch-scripts like Symantec Partition Magic (windows) does. The structure of my hard-drive looked something like this in the exact same order physically:

• Primary NTFS (C:)
• Primary extended:
• Linux /boot
• Linux /
• Primary Linux swap
• Primary HP Recovery NTFS (D:)

The HP Recovery partition is the one used to recover my Windows Vista on C:. Anyways, I managed to resize the first primary NTFS with GParted, booted up my Windows Vista. Through Paragon Partition Manager I managed to move and resize the extended primary partition closer to the first primary C:, moving /boot and expanding /. And that was probably where I messed up.

I restarted my computer and GRUB refused to boot my Fedora Linux, stating that /sbin/init is not found. Alright, I booted back to Vista, opened Paragon Partition Manager and accidentally clicked on some button called "Boot Wizard" which popped out a dialog box saying "Complete!". And this is where the fun stuff began…

After another reboot, I realized that grub is dead, and instead I see a Paragon Boot Wizard asking me to pick either “Boot from C:” or “Boot from HP Recovery”. The first option didn’t work, so I booted HP Recovery. The Recovery program analyzed my system and recovered the Vista partition, together with the MBR. Okay, so now I can boot my brand new Vista :)) At this moment I quickly burned a Fedora 10 Live CD and restarted again.

I managed to recover my previous GRUB boot loader from the Live CD and noticed that my old linux filesystem was mounted in /media/- (tutorials stated that it should be mounted to /mnt/sysimage). Anyways, I tried to chroot /media/- which said that I’m missing /bin/bash, and an ls -a /media/-/bin got me shocked! It was almost empty. Jesus christ! Although the /home /usr /sbin and other directories were okay. So I backed up my home directory and reinstalled Fedora 10 in about 20 minutes (plus software installation for about an hour). Now I’m back online and happy (I still do experience some PulseAudio problems in Skype though).

Well, the bottom line is don’t use any windows partition editors, nor laptop recovery systems together with linux filesystems. I bet that the GParted Live CD would have done the job for me in minutes.