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Is there a way to partition the drive in a running system?
The only way that I know of is to reboot onto a rescue disk and use gparted there to partition the drive.
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You can use parted on running systems just fine. On older systems, the drive with the OS will not update the partition table until you reboot, but repartitioning other drives should be updated fine. Parted will warn you if a reboot is needed.
On newer systems, even the drive under the running OS can be updated without a reboot.
I installed gparted using CLI. I can find a preferences file for gparted (that won't open) but I cannot run the program. I tried using a number of techniques to start gparted but so far nothing is working. I am not worried about doing a reboot to a rescue disk and then doing the work and then rebooting back into Debian testing but am also trying to use this as a learning opportunity (hopefully without that being learning how to redo the system as a whole which I have had to do at least twice since the original install). Thanks for your advice! Dee