Major fsck-up

[Junk]

On 2 Apr 2013, at 19:21, Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:

> On 04/02/2013 06:40 AM, Roger Heflin wrote:
>> You probably need to be clear about exactly what you mean by added what
>> was /boot to /home...
>> 
>> What did the partition table look like before and after you did the work?
>> 
>> was /boot before /home and you enlarged /home to be /home+/boot (the
>> partition before /home?)?
> 
> Actually, I don't have or need a separate /boot any more, and it's not used.  (It was too small, at about 250 MB, anyway.)  Nothing was in it and it hadn't been mounted in several years, so I got rid of it to tidy up.  As it was just before /home, I tried to expand /home to include it and that's when the program hung.  I thought I explained that in my original message, but either I didn't, or if I did, it wasn't clear enough.
> -- 
> 

I think it might be to do with moving the start of the partition. I see from the docs that Parted can't move the start of an ext2 or ext3 partition so I'm guessing your home was ext4 or something amenable. Probably the moving of the start of a partition involves shifting big wodges of data around. You might have interpreted this as your system freeze and turned it off before it had finished, maybe. This is a guess. I might spend a fun evening moving the start of partitions in VM's to see what happens and how long it takes. 

Junk.