I'm trying to change my system into a dual boot system. Currently I only have Solus installed. I am not ready to replace Solus with Arch or anything else, but I believe installing and using Arch as a seconadary bootable OS would be a good way to learn Linux on a deeper level and to evaluate using it as my main OS. The problem is I filled up my entire drive with the partitions used by Solus, so now I need to resize at least one of my partitions.

I downloaded the ISO for the latest Arch and burned it to a DVD. When I boot my computer it load the Arch installation from the DVD. From there I can use the terminal and am trying to resize the partitions. I have been trying to use this as a guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNU_Parted

The hard drive itself is at /dev/sda
The first partition on that drive is a swap partition used by Solus at /dev/sda1
The second partition is the main partition with Solus installed on it, which needs to be resized, at /dev/sda2 (ext4 filesystem).

In following the instructions I first resized the filesystem at /dev/sda2. Then I resized the partition itself. Then I informed the OS of the new partition size, just in case that is totally necessary. Then I rebooted and made sure Solus still worked. It worked, but when I looked at the disk info it seemed off. It was saying the partition size never changed, but I had less free space available than I previously did. I rebooted back into the Arch DVD, poked around, and discovered that while the filesystem had been resized, the partition was back to the original size. I went through that process 2 more times. Each time the new partition size seemed to take, but after I rebooted it went back to the original size.

Any idea what is going on here? Also I would like to know if it is ok to run the Solus OS while the partition size is larger than the filesystem installed on it. Is there anything that can go wrong with that like some program assuming the filesystem is the same size as the partition?

Is this an MBR install? How many partitions do you currently have? Posting the output of fdisk -l would give us some helpful info to work with.

not sure, but may be you have to save filesystem resizing changes (by typing "quit" command) before trying to resize partition?
I.e run parted twice: first time for resizing filesystem and second time for resizing partition.

Yes it is MBR. It is probably overkill to post all of this, but just in case it helps, here is the entire output from sudo fdisk -l while I am booted into Solus:

Disk /dev/ram0: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram1: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram2: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram3: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram4: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram5: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram6: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram7: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram8: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram9: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram10: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram11: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram12: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram13: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram14: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/ram15: 64 MiB, 67108864 bytes, 131072 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 59.5 GiB, 63864569856 bytes, 124735488 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xc3fc7391


Disk /dev/sda: 447.1 GiB, 480103981056 bytes, 937703088 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xaf1981c6

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 93 7812592 7812500 3.7G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2 * 7812624 441406368 433593745 206.8G 83 Linux

It looks like there is some free space on the drive that needs a partition.

Use gparted - it handles the filesystem and the partition resizing for you. Before you start (again) post these

While booted into Solus:

Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs devtmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs tmpfs 3.9G 95M 3.8G 3% /dev/shm
tmpfs tmpfs 3.9G 908K 3.9G 1% /run
tmpfs tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda2 ext4 204G 92G 102G 48% /
tmpfs tmpfs 3.9G 4.0K 3.9G 1% /tmp
tmpfs tmpfs 795M 40K 795M 1% /run/user/1000

Model: ATA SanDisk SDSSDXPS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 480GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
32.3kB 47.6kB 15.4kB Free Space
1 47.6kB 4000MB 4000MB primary linux-swap(v1)
4000MB 4000MB 15.9kB Free Space
2 4000MB 226GB 222GB primary ext4 boot
226GB 480GB 254GB Free Space

Reviewing that information from my last post, it is possible that nothing is wrong and I achieved my goal. So I also ran this command to compare with what I saw before:

Model: ATA SanDisk SDSSDXPS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 480GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 47.6kB 4000MB 4000MB primary linux-swap(v1)
2 4000MB 226GB 222GB primary ext4 boot

This seems different from what I saw before. I have a few ideas I want to investigate to see if the partition has really been resized and if a specific application has been resizing it again.

You know I think I'm all good now. Every program that I use to probe the drive for information is reporting the same thing, I have a bunch of unallocated space that I can turn into a new partition. Even looking at the drive from the graphical Disks program that comes with Solus / Budgie, it looks different from before and shows that space I need as unallocated.