There's a good expression used in an American judicial decision: the judge said he wouldn't "let the sideshow take over the whole circus". I think that's what I've done.

I use Fedora. I want to shrink my / partition (/dev/hdb2) in order to create an extra partition on which to install a later version of Fedora. (I'm not prepared to erase my existing version until I've satisfied myself that all is well with the new one.)

A book I've often used to help me said that one should use QTParted to shrink the partition.

I booted up with a Knoppix live cd and tried to use the provided QTParted, but it wouldn't let me resize the partition.

I went Googling and found that I couldn't use QTParted to resize a partition with an ext3 file system on it. I first had to change the file system to ext2, then resize, then change back to ext3 (if I wanted).

I found on the Web a Red Hat (v 9) page called "Reverting to an ext2 File System": http://www.fis.unipr.it/pub/linux/redhat/9++/en/doc/RH-DOCS/rhl-cg-en-9/s1-f...

Its instructions, in summary, were, with /dev/hdb2 unmounted:

#/sbin/tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/hdb2 #/sbin/e2fsck -y /dev/hdb2 # <mount /dev/hdb2> " Next, remove the .journal file at the root level of the partition by changing to the directory where it is mounted and typing: rm -f .journal". "If you permanently change the partition to ext2, remember to update the /etc/fstab file."

In Knoppix, I followed the first two instructions and then ran QTParted. It showed /dev/hdb2 as having an ext2 file system. I also edited the /etc/fstab file on /dev/hdb2 to change the file system shown for /dev/hdb2 to ext2. I didn't remove the .journal file, simply because I couldn't find one, but I thought that maybe it had been automatically erased when I changed the file system to ext2.

I then booted up in Fedora and got during booting up:

"mounting root filesystem ext3: no journal on filesystem on hdb2 mount: error 22 mounting ext3 mount: error 2 mounting none switching to new root switchroot: mount failed: 22 umount /initrd/dev failed 2"

(There was more, but that's all I copied down.)

Can anyone tell me what more I should be doing than's on the Red Hat page?

Thanks for reading,

Leslie