bkil vs. programming

A default clean install usually doesn't fit me. However, I've installed Ubuntu LTS just like that on this machine when both were new. It has a small but fast SSD. It has been working flawlessly until now. I've recently reconsidered that I could use a bit more space. From experience, I never had a need for swap, as I'm using zram . So I've decided to simply delete the swap partition. Of course, solving it simply was only my dream. Technically, you need to delete the swap partition, optionally move middle partitions to the end, expand your root file system and be done with it. I've first made whole disk backups. I've booted off a flash drive containing Ubuntu 12.10. Deleting the partition with GParted was a breeze, as well as marking the rest of the needed operations, move and resize. But there was a catch: it bailed out with a cryptic message halfway. (I think it was "GNU Parted cannot resize this partition to this size. We're working on it!...

Some years ago, I've found a few bad sectors on my WD10EARS Caviar Green drive not too long after purchasing, but I decided to simply partition around it. Actually, I can't remember now when that was, but I've either used up a major part of the disk and had nowhere to back up everything by then, or I've deliberately planned to extend the warranty by a replacement... The original purchase came standard with 3 years of warranty. The drive didn't store too precious data in general, but no attention was given to the issue for years. The fault seemed to propagate by a few dozen bad sectors over the allocated 1GB margin, injecting a few macroblock errors to 5 of my unimportant home recordings. Actually this spreading was really slow, as occasional slowdowns were indeed experienced when randomly accessing some of the files in the past, but the fix was never a priority. For serious use, I'd like to point out the importance of data scrubbing for protecting against b...