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submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by someoneFromInternet@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

Hello! I have a /home partition that is almost full, and there is another partition nearby with a lot of free space. I would like to reduce the size of this neighboring partition and add the freed space to /home. I would like to do this safely, without using a Live USB or bootable flash drive. Is this possible?

upd: gparted just worked(through a live usb stick)! Sometimes I try to use symlinks, but not this time :) Thanks everyone!

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[-] monovergent@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago

Doing anything with partitions safely means having a current backup of your disk.

What you want to do might be possible if your disk was set up with LVM, but I don't have too much experience with it. If you have a more traditional partitioning scheme, the problem is that you can't really shave off the front of the next partition if you want to expand /home to the right, and you can't tack free space to the front of a partition, if say, you shrink the partition to the left of /home.

If, for example, you want to expand /home into a partition on the right, you'd have to shrink that partition, back it up, delete the original, expand /home to the desired size, and copy the backed-up partition into its new, smaller place. If that other partition is not mounted, you could do the procedure without a live USB, if you insist.

this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
28 points (96.7% liked)

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