I cleaned it up and removed software I didn't really use, but the fact is I was out of space and needed to add more. I didn't want to reinstall or lose anything so I decided to edit the partitions. I searched the net and found a few people asking about this with very crappy responses. I decided the best way to do this was to simply get a copy of the Gparted live cd and see what it could do.

After booting into Gparted live cd Gparted automatically fires up showing me all my partitions. My partitons were in the following order:

windows ntfs, /root ext3, /swap, /home ext3

I resized /home freeing up about five gigabytes from /home plus part of SWAP. I still could not resize /root so I deleted the freed up space and recreated them as empty partitions. Still couldn't add it to /root, because SWAP was in the way plus I freed up the 5gb from the end of /home. I had to resize /home to get the 5gb in front.

Now it looked like this:

windows-ntfs, /root-ext3, swap, empty, empty, /home-ext3,

I deleted SWAP, now I could resize /root. I resized root and recreated SWAP and applied the changes. After awhile it completed and I booted into Mandriva with no data loss or drive problems.

I do suggest backing up your system before doing this. Even though it want off without a hitch for me it does not mean you will have as smooth a ride. Mandriva has a snapshot and backup utility and I had a USB 500tb drive to backup to. If you're looking for a nice automatic backup tool, like OS X TimeMachine, check out Flyback or TimeVault

Initial Resize

Finishing up