Moving the partition to the left in live ISO (Gparted) cause error?

Issues & Assistance
1

(This screenshot was after I added the nvme0n1p4 partition to the root using sudo btrfs device add -f /dev/nvme0n1p4 /, which is why it’s filled, but it was unallocated before.)

I want to move my /dev/nvme0n1p5 (which is the current/root partition) to the left (right next to nvme0n1p3), but it failed on both the gparted live iso and the cachyos live iso. In gparted live iso, it simply says it failed and saved the details in htm, but unfortunately I had no idea how to open/view it as the (ugly) DE was too minimum. But it failed at this part (around the 5/8 checking fs roots yadda yadda):

In cachyos live iso, I installed gparted using sudo pacman -Sy gparted. But for some reason I got these unknown key (…) found in leaf … error messages when moving the partition to the left:

It froze the window too, and only updated every, like, 3 minutes. I almost sh*t my pants thinking I’ve corrupted the system. I spam clicked Cancel in hopes that the clicks got registered when the window got updated again. I clicked the X on top right, it said the program isn’t responding and asked to terminate, so I did that. Thankfully it hasn’t changed anything and I can still boot normally.

So, how am I supposed to move the btrfs partition to the left?

2

You need to delete the 1p4 first and then move 1p5 to the left, and recreate 1p4 as necessary in the remaining space to the right.

You cannot just swap their locations while they are both occupied with data and there is no free space.

3

They are not both being occupied, only one of them. The 1p4 was unallocated.

4

Then make it unallocated again.

5

I did that before. 1p4 was unallocated (no partition name) (with the same size as the one in the screenshot), so I moved 1p5 to the left. But it failed. That screenshot was taken after I gave up, booted to the actual cachyos, and did sudo btrfs device add -f /dev/nvme0nn1p4 /.

6

Another friendly suggestion:

Never move a partition containing a Btrfs root filesystem without a full backup.

Btrfs subvolumes and snapshots can be corrupted if the filesystem is not cleanly unmounted.

This is still a friendly suggest:

If you’re not confident, consider re-partitioning entirely and re-installing with a proper layout (e.g., using nvme0n1p1 for EFI, nvme0n1p2 for swap, nvme0n1p3 for root, and nvme0n1p4 for home).

Yes but look again:

swapon --show 
NAME       TYPE       SIZE USED PRIO
/dev/zram0 partition 15.5G   0B  100
/dev/sdd3  partition   17G   0B   -1
7

swap? Doesn’t CachyOS come with zram already? Also nvm, from the looks of it I think I’d stick with the sudo btrfs device add … method rather than reinstalling stuff (I don’t have enough external/another storage for backup), but thanks

8

I see.

ERROR: unknown key ... found in leaf ...

May indicate some problem with the filesystem.

So this might be even more attractive;

Instead of trying to fix and move this existing partition that may be corrupted.

9

So would it be possible to move the partition without reinstalling/reconfiguring if I delete all the snapshots (and subvolumes? I’m not sure what this is or how it works)? Assuming I don’t need them

10

I’m sticking to Post #8

If your Linux Guru, that might be a suggestion.

You cannot move a Btrfs partition as a whole; instead, you move the data and reconfigure the mount points.