Couldn't you boot off a USB memory stick which has gparted, so that your real disk is not mounted. Then you can use gparted to shrink a partition and move it/them up to give you the room to grow sda1.

Thanks for the hint. I've looked into that and it's really a far better idea and a lot easier than what I was going to try. (I would have used a live system to work on the disk, though.)

I wouldn't dare doing anything like that without a backup.

Couldn't you boot off a USB memory stick which has gparted, so that your real disk is not mounted. Then you can use gparted to shrink a partition and move it/them up to give you the room to grow sda1. I should probably include a warning about backing up...

Geoff

That is what I'd do. I've done similar maneuvers with gparted many times. Shrink /root by however much space you want to give to /boot, move /root up leaving the now-unallocated space for a simple resize of /boot. Fast and easy.

You do have to run gparted from a LiveCD/USB session.

Geoff

1. You should probably not change file system type at the same time as repartitioning. I know that sound engineering tells you to change at least two things every time, but sometimes it's safer to take it in steps.

2. rsync transfer of a root partition is not something I've had success with. Perhaps resizing and dd transfer is an option. (Somewhere someone said ext3 be converted to ext4 without reformatting).

3. Be ready to manually update the UUIDs in grub.cfg and fstab. I'm not sure whether UUIDs will change or not, but I would expect them to.

The problem with my partition scheme is this: When I originally installed the system, I chose to create a pretty small boot partition (50MB). That has already turned out as a bad decision on the current system. And as the Linux kernel will probably continue to get bigger, I think I really shouldn't leave it like that.

Now, all my partitions are primary partitions and together they make use of all the space available on my hard drive. So, resizing anything there won't be too easy. The possible solution I've come up with is as follows:

First, here's my current partition scheme:

NAME   MOUNTPOINT   SIZE
sda               298,1G
├─sda1 /boot         47M
├─sda2 /             14G
├─sda3 [SWAP]       1,9G
└─sda4 /home      282,2G

What I would want to do is give 100-150MB more to the boot partition. Those could easily be taken from my half-empty root partition. So, what if I made a backup of both (using rsync), then used fdisk to delete them, then used fdisk again to create a boot partition at the beginning of the drive that is 100-150MB bigger as well as a root partiton taking up the rest of the space between the boot and swap partitions and finally played in the backups?

I can't think of any reason for which that shouldn't work generally. But there are probably some dangers and caveats. For example, I'm unsure if it will cause any trouble if I use ext4 as the file system on the new root partition instead of ext3, which is being used on the current one.