Resize ext3 partitions

March 16, 2007

categories:

Howto
Linux

Say we have a brand new already ext3 formatted disk on our system.. say it has a 300 GB partition and it is brand new, so not running anything on the system. DO NOT TRY RESIZING PARTITIONS ON SYSTEM DISKS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

We are gonna copy the old 100 GB partition to the new partition.

Old : sda2 New : sdb1

dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=4k

When it’s done, if mounted, the system will think the new partition is 100 GB big. We need to resize it.

Don’t mount ! Or if you did to make sure data were correctly copied, unmount the new partition !

Check for problems on the new partition

fsck -n /dev/sdb1

Remove the old ext3 journal, this is needed to resize..

tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdb1

Force checking, this is absolutely needed for the next step

e2fsck -f /dev/sdb1

Resize partition

resize2fs /dev/sdb1

Check fs again

fsck -n /dev/sdb1

Create ext3 journal

tune2fs -j /dev/sdb1

Now mount the new partition, relabel it or edit your fstab.. It all depends on your config there.

More info : http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_resizing_ext3_partitions

Wouter explains you can do online resizing of an ext3 partition : http://www.grep.be/blog/en/computer/cluebat/actually_you_can

Sebastien Wains

Resize ext3 partitions

Thanks for reading this post!