Resize Partitions on A Remote Server

Question

I have two partitions, one is about 1.8TB (home) and the other is 20GB (root). I want this to be the other way round, 1.8TB (root) and 20GB (home). I've been reading for some time, but am struggling to find a solution.

I am told I cannot use:

sudo fdisk -l

as I am using GUID Partition Table.

Running parted, I get the following for 'print devices':

/dev/sda (2000GB)
/dev/sdb (2000GB)
/dev/md2 (21.0GB)
/dev/md3 (1979GB)

I know little of filesystems, but I believe the 1st two are seperate 2Tb hard drives, and the md2 and md3 are my root and home partitions.

Is there any way I can shrink /dev/md3 to 21GB and grow /dev/md2 to 1979GB via SSH?

Answer 1

As a general rule, a desktop system's /home partition should be much larger than the root (/) partition. Your 20GB for root (/) is likely to be more than adequate for all the programs and other system files you're likely to need. User files should be stored in /home, so it could well need to be much bigger, particularly if you store multimedia files (photos, music, videos, etc.).

That said, if you really do have need for this resizing, there are lots of questions and answers here about it, like this one. The fact that you're using GPT isn't really very relevant, since the tool you'll use for this task (GParted) works on both MBR and GPT.