Hi All,

I wonder if this is possible to extend or regrow the Linux hard disk partition from 8 GB to 20 GB without losing the existing data on the partition ?

at the moment this Ubuntu Linux is deployed on top of VMware and I've just regrow the hard drive from 8 GB into 20 GB but can't see the effect immediately.

can anyone suggest how to do this without losing the data ?

and I found some strange error message when i do the fdisk -l ?


Thanks,

Albert

Extend /, no, because your swap is right up against your / and you are not using LVM. You could, however, add another partiton.

Looks like your swap partition is about 1.5GB? So you have unpartitioned space on the disk.

To add a new partition, use fdisk (or cfdisk or gparted) to create a new partition on the disk. You will likely need to reboot here. Then use mkfs to create a filesystem on the new block device - probably /dev/sda3 or /dev/sda6. Then add a line in /etc/fstab for it and mount it with mount.

The partition boundary message is a warning, not an error. It is not optimal but it is not harmful.

1 members found this post helpful.

thanks for your reply mate,

so in this case for all general linux installation, resizing the / partition is not recommended ?

cmiiw.

Not sure what you mean. Resizing / is possible in general, but not possible for you in this specific case.

1 members found this post helpful.

thanks for the reply, may I know why ?

what I've found from the internet is the command "resize2fs -p /dev/sda1", does it resize proportionally for all of my partition ?

Perhaps you should (re-)read post #2. I don't know what you think that command will do, but "man resize2fs" will tell you what the options are.
Best way to do this is a gparted liveCD - boot that in your VM. It's a GUI that will allow you to move the swap (and extended partition) out of the way so there is some contiguous free space after sda1. The you can resize it - gparted will do everything for you, so you won't need the resize2fs command at all.

BTW, don't edit your image(s) - if we can't read what's actually important, rather than what you think is important, we can't help you. Air your concerns, but leave the data intact.

1 members found this post helpful.

ah.. do you mean the screenshot or the disk image ?

As I said - your swap is right up against your root partition, and you aren't using LVM, so you can't just extend /: something else is in the way!

I did not think of moving your swap partition, though, as syg00 says. So what you can do is boot a live CD, delete swap, expand /, remake swap, then resize2fs the / partition. And yeah gparted is probably the easiest way to do this.

1 members found this post helpful.

depending on how you setup vmware you might not see any change until you add files