Q4OS Forum

jackdanielsesq

Member

From: Phuket

Registered: 2017-12-19

Posts: 149

HDD Conundrum

Gentlemen

Have a large HDD with many partitions - mainly different flavors of Q4OS - viz 2.4, 2.5, 3.1, everything works

sda1 = 4G swap ....but never active ... suspend works perfectly ...

sda2 is 13G - #1 - 2.4 - now too small - need to expand it - no room on either side except 4G swap

sda7 = 20G - #2 - 3.1 - can steal 4G from it for swap, no sweat ...

Any hands on actual experience, known issues, etc, most welcome - hardware is not the problem, grub2 is

Had several suspend issues after updates, which are now resolved, dont want to wreck this ...

Need tried/trusted solutions, on copying, moving, modifying grub2, which I have wrecked/repaired previously

Addendum - 90x sec watchdog is now active on every installation except #6 - 2.5 & #5 Qiana 17 on sdb3 - tried
every fix known to google and then some - no joy - uber annoying

Thank you

Regards

Jack

Dai_trying

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2015-12-14

Posts: 2,992

Re: HDD Conundrum

I have had to re-organise my HDD on several occasions and the easiest solution I found is to use a Live-Cd and then you can simply create the area of free space on your HDD and you can move your partitions (I usually use Gparted) around on the HDD to create the space where you want it. Another thing you could do is copy a partition to another area to give your HDD space to expand another partition in the area you need. Don't forget to check they both have the same UUID before removing the original partition.

One thing to note though, if you are using a BIOS boot system (MBR) you will likely have an extended partition to be able to create more than 4 partitions, this could cause an issue if you want to expand a partition in your primary section of the HDD (before the extended partition) but can be overcome by copying a partition from there to the extended partition (this will keep UUID) and then remove the original one to give you free space in primary section.

Once you have all your partitions re-sized/moved you might find that grub will not recognise the correct partition to boot from and leave you without a system to control grub, in this case simply boot up your Live-Cd again and you can chroot into the system that you want to be in control of grub and re-install grub (and update it) and it will pick up all the correct HDD locations for all OS's (providing you have os-prober installed which would likely be done as grub would not find other OS's without it).

And regarding your partitions that have a 90 Second delay on boot-up, check the /etc/fstab of each installation to make sure they all point to the correct swap partition UUID, this has been a real PITA for me and is one of the reasons I only use Live-Cd for installations (you can disable swap formatting)

One last and most important point is make sure you have a good backup of everything, there is always the possibility of power outtage/spike during a critical HDD operation that could cause major issues, pretty unlikely most of the time but if you have no backup then it is more likely to happen!