blog.rimann.org

Step 0

Before doing anything: Backup!

A small but very important step!

Step 1

gksu "update-manager -c -d"

This invokes the update manager. The parameters tell it to list upgrades to newer distriubtions (for updaters like me).

OK, klick on "update" and wait.

STOP
The update manager tells me there's not enough space left on my hard drive. The update process will consume something between 400 and 500MB. There are only some 230MB left on my drive.

Step 2

As my Ubuntu installation runs as a guest within VMWare Workstation on WinXP, i need to enlarge the Virtual Hard drive first. After asking Google for possible solutions I found one that was working for me:

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 36Gb myDisk.vmdk

This command worked after deleting all Snapshots of my disk. You need to change the size and the path to your *.vmdk file of course.

Step 3

After an initial boot I didn't have more space available on my file system. Of course, the partition that contains all my stuff is still 5GB "small" - the whole drive has 10GB now.

I asked Google again and it told me that I should use qparted or the graphical frontend for it: qtparted. And also that I cannot resize the current boot partition while it's on. Ok, I understand that.

So I downloaded a Rescue CD (bootable CD image) and told my VMWare to use that iso file as CD drive. I could boot and also start qtparted. With that, I could move the swap partition to the end of the drive. For the partition I'd like to change, I had no options to move or resize - all disabled. f*ck!

Step 4

Google get's a friend the longer I have stress with my setup...

Ext3 is nothing else than Ext2 with Journaling. That's the theory. qtparted can only handle Ext2 filesystems, not ext3.

So exit qtparted and use the command

tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sda1

to disable the journaling functionality (and therefore convert ext3 to ext2).

Use qtparted again, resize the partition and exit. Then use the command

tune2fs -O has_journal /dev/sda1

to re-start journaling (and with that, convert the partition back from ext2 to ext3).

Step 5

After booting up my Ubuntu system, first of all I was happy that everything worked fine so far - no data loss as I can see. The system still boots - and: It has enough free space now!

gksu "update-manager -c -d"

This command start's the update manager. This time it doesn't complain about space. It took more than one hour to remove some old packages, download all the new packages, and update exactly 999 packages on my system. But the Ubuntu update process worked like a charm!

My system is now working on Ubuntu Linux 6.10 "Edgy eft" after more than 4 hours of doing stuff and waiting again.