How to resize a /home partition in Kubuntu?

Question

I was distro hopping for awhile in the past few months, so in order to keep all of my files secure, I made a partition of around 50 GB named Files to store all of my files in, and still have them for quick and easy access. However, now that I've found a distribution I'm comfortable with (Kubuntu 11.10), I would like to remove this partition, and have all of my files in my /home folder, in order to more easily deal with these files.

I've moved all of my files in the partition to my /home folder (and still have plenty of room to spare), and now I'm trying to delete the partition and use the space for my /home folder. I can delete the partition just fine, however, I can't extend the /home folder into the unallocated space. Here's a screenshot of what I'm talking about.

In order to change the size of the /home partition, I need to unmount it. But, I am unable to unmount it! How do I best extend the size of the partition?

Solution

Boot from live media so no partitions are mounted. The ability to live extend partitions is the big bonus of using LVM.

If you use something like resize2fs you should be able to do it without live media.

As long as your tool is doing an appropriate resize you should keep all your files. This is why I prefer CLI for important operations over gui tools. You never know exactly what they're doing.

Comments

[Devon]

If I do this, will my files still remain intact?

[Rinzwind]

@devon yes, if used correctly (if yo tell the system to format the partition ... ;) ). I used this method to resize a 500Gb disc w/o removing files. Btw...if the partition is full it might take same time since the system will try to move files around your system to create empty space.