Uwe Hermann - Resizing ext3 partitions with parted - Comments

ext2 IFS can work, BUT

supermorph — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:22:39 +0100

ext2 IFS can work, BUT ext2fsd is better

2 reasons,

1) more options than ext2IFS,
2) its open source

hope it helps,
supermorph

holy shmoly it actually worked

Chris Hiestand — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:24:40 +0100

Much like Giulio, and probably others, I had to resize an ext3 VM partition (vm running on ESX), which had been created in the standard way:
/dev/sda1 was the / ext3 partition,
/dev/sda2 extended
/dev/sda5 swap

I just followed the same steps - expand the vm disk, boot knoppix, remove journaling, delete the extended and swap partitions. expand the ext2 partition, recreate the extended/swap partitions, add journaling to sda1, and reboot.

I was actually kind of surprised when the machine booted and worked correctly on the first try. Alright!

Resize Ext3 Partitions

kks — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 08:20:44 +0100

The function tune2fs appears to work perfectly.

#tune2fs -O^has_journal /dev/hdaN
Do whatever...

#tune2fs -j /dev/hdaN

Resizing ext3 partitions with parted

kks — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 08:14:20 +0100

I followed the following on my Debian 4.0 box to remove the idle ext3 /dev/hda3 and add it to /dev/hda2. Booting using Knoppix3.9 and making sure partitions are not mounted
$su #fsck /dev/hda2 #fsck /dev/hda3 #tune2fs -O^has_journal /dev/hda2 #parted ... (parted)rm 3 (parted)resize 2 1217 3648 error: File system has incompatible feature enabled.
I am unable to understand the error. Please comment. Thanks.

resizing ext3 partitions

Raul — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 10:21:33 +0100

http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_resizing_ext3_partitions

if something goes wrong with gparted (it often does) just try to follow in which step you are and continue manually

gparted

Uwe Hermann — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 23:47:51 +0200

Nice, thanks for reporting!

Uwe.

gparted is awesome!

5mi11er — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 22:48:26 +0200

After spending 2 days trying to resize a ext3 partition under vmware esx, I ran across your comment.

We don't have VirtualCenter, and thus can't get the licensed version of VMWare Converter, which means we can't use that product to increase the size of the drives during a copy. So, I then tried all the partition managment tools that come on Hiren's boot CD 9.2. None of them could do it, including partition magic 8.xx.

Thanks to your comment about GParted, I hunted it down, grabbed the GParted+Clonezilla live CD, and, after having to change from an LSI type SCSI controller to a Bus Logic type SCSI controller on a test vmware guest OS box, added the hard drive image to resize to that virtual machine, booted up the live CD, and within 15 minutes the expansion of the ext3 partition was complete.

GParted rocks! Link: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

-Scott

Its worth mentioning that to

surlyjake — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 15:59:38 +0200

Its worth mentioning that to boot knoppix without mounting your Hard drive, you should type : "knoppix nofstab" at the boot prompt.

Accessing Debian Ext2/3 Volumes from XP Dual Boot System

James Pannozzi — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:19:19 +0200

On my dual boot boxes (Windows XP and Debian Unstable)
could you suggest a driver, useable
from XP which I can use to read
my Debian Volumes from within XP?

I am forced to keep XP on some boxes for
contract work though almost everything
I do is now done in Debian.

Thanks
Jimserac

Great! it works for me!

ThanhTran — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 06:08:57 +0200

I was running qtParted, parted, but they didn't work. They said the partition was busy eventhough I booted from a live CD. I'd tried the gparted too, but I thought it was dead because it kept scanning for 10 minutes with no result. After reading your post, I tried it again and was more patience. It worked finally :)

Thanh

I have resized my primary

xaKira — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 14:29:35 +0100

I have resized my primary Ubuntu (Edgy Eft 6.10) partition from 27GB to 5GB and created another 5GB partition at the same time with the included GParted program with no problems noticed as yet. I had to do it by booting with the LiveCD and running System => Administration => Gnome Partition Editor from the CD.

gparted

Heikki — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 12:48:39 +0200

I just resized my ext3 partition with gparted. Very easy. No problems encountered.

Resize Ext3 Partitions

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 06:07:51 +0200

This issue here is that you cannot resize Ext3 filesystems as they are a journaled filesystem. Any resizing would play havoc with Inode referrences. The only way to do this is to:

1. backup your data on the partition
2. delete the Ext3 partition
3. recreate partitions in the empty (deleted) filespace

Resizing ext3 partition

Arun Mallikarjunan — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 03:42:34 +0100

theres this utility called partimage which comes prepackaged with sysrecuecd . this creates a bzip of the data in a partition. so you can create a bzip then do whatever u want with the parition and then unzip using the same partimage into the new partition.

resizing a vmware disk

Giulio — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 10:11:22 +0100

Thanks to your instructions I was able to resize
a vmware disk and the root partition of a virtual Ubuntu
running on Fedore3. Here are the steps
- resize the vmware disk using the utility 'vmware-vdiskmanager'
(not described in the various help of vmware, but the man
is selfexplaining, with an example)
- reboot the virtual machine with knoppix, using option 'noswap':
- remove swap partition with qtparted (yes, I could have
used directly parted)
- resize the root partition following your instructions
- added swap partition (again with qtparted - when it works
it is confortable...)
- rebooted virtual ubuntu and it worked as expected!
[obviously, before the operation I have archieved the virtual
machine with in a tgz file.

Thanks again!

Resizing ext3 partitions with parted

Uwe Hermann — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 16:08:34 +0200

A while ago I wanted to enlarge my /home partition (hda6), as it was getting full. After that partition I had another (unused) one, which I intended to merge with hda6 and thereby increase the amount of free disk space on /home.

Here's parts of the disk layout:

hda6 Logical Linux ext3 30848.00
hda7 Logical Linux ext3 8848.00

So, merging hda7 into hda6 should be as simple as removing hda7, and then resizing hda6 to swallow up the 8 gig from the former hda7. Basically, that's how it worked, but I had a few problems. First, at that time is seemed impossible to simply resize ext3 partitions. Neither ext2resize, nor QtParted, nor parted worked for me for some reasons (maybe that has changed recently).

After some googling I finally found a way to do it (which I'll document here, maybe it'll be helpful for others):

Boot from Knoppix, not mounting any partition
Run fsck on both, hda6 and hda7 (optional?)
Remove hda7 (e.g. using cfdisk)
Remove the ext3 journal from hda6 (effectively turning it into an ext2 partition):
# tune2fs -O^has_journal /dev/hda6
Resize hda6 using parted. The xxxx is the original start of hda6 (you may not change that) and yyyy is the end of the disk:
# parted
(parted) resize 6 xxxxx yyyyy
Enable the ext3 journal again on the now enlarged hda6:
tune2fs -j /dev/hda6
Reboot

But this didn't work from the beginning either — for some strage reason parted didn't believe me that the space after hda6 was free. It did display it as free space, but the "resize" operation complained.

So what I did was this (instead af the above step 3):

Re-add the hda7 partition using, e.g., cfdisk
Start parted, and remove hda7 again from within parted(!):
# parted
(parted) rm 7

It seems parted didn't like the way cfdisk removed the hda7 partition... very strange...