Friday 15 June 2012

Expanding an ext3 partition

As has been documented at howtoforgehere and many other places you can find with a search, resize2fs can expand your ext3 filesystem without losing data. (It's actually one case of resizing, you can also shrink.) You have to extend the containing partition first, using parted or the CLI way, by deleting and recreating the partition with a higher cylinder boundary.


I just want to add a few comments. 1. The switching to ext2 and back mentioned in the howtoforge article isn't necessary any more. 2. You can do this on a partition that is not needed for system operation like /home without booting to a rescue disk. This is useful if you have only online access to the server. In fact I did the expansion in parallel with some (tested) RHEL package updates. 3. It works exactly as expected for SAN volumes. It was very nice with a SAN, all the SAN manager had to do when I requested an expansion was to issue a command for the SAN to increase the "disk" size and it finished the task in a few hours.


If you are using logical volume manager, then you have other options too.

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