ext3 resize again

[Ross Boylan]

I just ran into the problem reported a few days ago about using parted
on ext3 created on a RedHat 9 system.  I gather from the discussion that
parted won't work on this (I have a single SCSI disk, no RAID).  I got
the system this way, so I'm not exactly sure how it was created.

Perhaps someone could help me with a more practical question: how can I
manipulate such partitions?  I used resize2fs to shrink the filesystem,
but the partition itself is as before.  How can I make it smaller?

I tried parted, but it still gives me the error about a funny looking
filesystem and refuses to do anything.

I see some hints that I should simply delete the partition and recreate
it with fdisk, but this seems an awefully risky course.  And I'm not
entirely sure how to match the size exactly, since I think the units are
slightly different between the different programs. (e.g., fdisk reports
blocks that seem to be 1024, or perhaps 1000, though I thought they were
usually 512 bytes.  resize also uses "blocks".  parted uses Mg).

Thanks.
-- 
Ross Boylan                                      wk: (415) 502-4031
530 Parnassus Avenue (Library) rm 115-4          address@hidden
Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics           hm: (415) 550-1062
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, CA 94143-0840