How to inrease free size in mounted file system

[lexroxas]

Hi! I'm a new member and knows little about managing linux file systems.

I'm using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (x86_64) and the df -kh command ouputs:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 5.7G 5.2G 209M 97% /
udev 2.0G 120K 2.0G 1% /dev
/dev/sda3 568G 35M 540G 1% /home

I'm using RAID 10 with 4 hardisks.

I'm only familiar with Windows 2003 and we have this lone SUSE Linux server for our accounting department's accounting software that can be accessed via a website, so I suppose this makes it a web server and database server for the accounting software of that department.

The problem lies in the /dev/sda1 because on the daily basis its free size decreases due to the accumulation of acccounting data due to its daily use. As you will notice I have only 209MB for /dev/sda1 and an almost unchanged (on a daily basis) 540GB for /dev/sda3. I wish to know the exact and proper procedure in increasing the free size of /dev/sda1 to like 200GB from its 209MB current free size. I suppose that the 200GB will come from the 540GB /dev/sda3 but I don't know how to safely do that without risking the loss of our accounting data.

The accounting software uses mysql and it can be shutdown via a command line. Also, during the first installation of SUSE Linux 10 operating system nothing was changed, all default settings were accepted during installation. After the O/S installation, the accounting software installation followed and now this problem.

Kindly help me resolve this. I will truly appreciate any help.

Lexroxas
The Philippines

[gogalthorp]

Need to see result of fdisk -l ( lower case L not a one), Need to see all the partitions.

The safest and surest method is it back everything up and configure the machine properly. In fact the first thing is to back it all up before doing anything.

I also suggest that you move the data from the root partition to a new partition all it's own. It makes upgrading much easier when important data is not on the root partition. That means moving the databases to a new much larger partition.

I'm surprised that a default install would only set root to only 5.9 gig

[cutegoat]

lexroxas,

If you can't reconfigure your partitions you can try this:

what's your filesystem type.

Can you post df -Th output?

If filesystem type is ext3 we may create a empty space up to 5% of the size of / partition. It's about 300 megabytes in your case.