How do I resize root partition?
I have a dual boot setup with Ubuntu and Windows 7. I need to shrink my root Ubuntu volume in order to get some free space to create a new partition. Are there any Windows based tools that will do this for me? I tried booting up in gparted to do this but I cannot tell which partition is which since I cannot find the size (it displays everything in blocks).
Windows 7 comes with it’s own resizing Tool but can only resize NTFS volumes as Windows 7 doesn’t «see» ext4 (or other Filesystems besides FAT) by the way you shouldn’t resize stuff while you’re using the drive, what you see on gParted are partitions the most obvious way to tell which one is the one you want to change is simply by looking at its size.
I can’t see size, only blocks. are there any softwares on windows that support the resizing of ext3 drives?
@Necross gparted is a graphical tool, not command line, and it clearly shows size in mb, and what the filesystem type is so you can easily tell which one is the Windows partition ( because it is NTFS ).
6 Answers 6
Parted Magic is a good suggestion, but if you already have an Ubuntu live CD or USB stick you can boot from that and run GParted from there. Basically, you need to boot from something which is not the hard drive you’re going to resize partitions on.
As it’s already been pointed out — gparted is a graphical utility, so what you’re referring to as «GParted» is definitely not it. Which brings me to another important point: make sure you have a backup of everything, because your chances of screwing everything up are relatively high 🙂
You can burn the Parted Magic OS into a CD and boot from that. That OS includes a very basic graphical interface as well as GParted and other graphical tools. It should make a job like resizing any partition really easy, because it boots from ram and you can manipulate any partition from the familiar environment of GParted.
- Website
- Screenshots: You can note from the screenshots that size on that GParted is displayed quite nicely.
Resizing a partition is a slow task, so make sure your computer doesn’t shut down if you are on a laptop for example.
- Boot with Ubuntu installation cd, choose to try ubuntu
- Use GParted partition editor to resize your partitions.
Yes, use gparted. Boot from your Ubuntu CD and in the terminal type: sudo -i gparted
there you can resize and delete/create partitions. When you apply the changes, I would recommend not to interrupt the progress.
Increase partition size on which Ubuntu is installed?
I have Ubuntu installed on a drive. The problem is it is running low on disk space. This is installed on vmware. I expanded the virtual drive and booted into ubuntu. But when I opened gparted(sudo gparted), the move/resize option is unavailable. This is the partition Ubuntu is installed on, but I need to resize it. Any ideas? I am comfortable using command line
You can see how they do it in raspi-config for the Raspberry Pi, where expanding the root file system is something you do almost every time you set up a new Raspberry Pi. github.com/RPi-Distro/raspi-config/blob/…
I’ve found a youtube tutorial which can be a good answer for this question, it starts at this position: youtu.be/07hpUigWQyY?t=1538
8 Answers 8
As a matter of fact, you CAN enlarge the root filesystem while Ubuntu is running (I learned this recently myself here) — this sounds incredible but it’s true 🙂
Here’s the list of steps for a simple scenario where you have two partitions, /dev/sda1 is an ext4 partition the OS is booted from and /dev/sdb2 is swap. For this exercise we want to remove the swap partition an extend /dev/sda1 to the whole disk.
- As always, make sure you have a backup of your data — since we’re going to modify the partition table there’s a chance to lose all your data if you make a typo, for example.
- Run sudo fdisk /dev/sda
- use p to list the partitions. Make note of the start cylinder of /dev/sda1
- use d to delete first the swap partition ( 2 ) and then the /dev/sda1 partition. This is very scary but is actually harmless as the data is not written to the disk until you write the changes to the disk.
- use n to create a new primary partition. Make sure its start cylinder is exactly the same as the old /dev/sda1 used to have. For the end cylinder agree with the default choice, which is to make the partition to span the whole disk.
- use a to toggle the bootable flag on the new /dev/sda1
- review your changes, make a deep breath and use w to write the new partition table to disk. You’ll get a message telling that the kernel couldn’t re-read the partition table because the device is busy, but that’s ok.
- Reboot with sudo reboot . When the system boots, you’ll have a smaller filesystem living inside a larger partition.
- The next magic command is resize2fs . Run sudo resize2fs /dev/sda1 — this form will default to making the filesystem to take all available space on the partition.
That’s it, we’ve just resized a partition on which Ubuntu is installed, without booting from an external drive.
@Isaac: Yes, we still have to reboot to make the kernel to re-read the partition table. However, a quick reboot in many scenarios is a much smaller problem than booting from an external medium (think of remote machines, headless machines, VPSes etc.)
Two quick notes: 1. You can use df to show the «resulting» space after this (confirm that it worked), and 2. remember to recreate some swap space!
Thanks so much. Ubuntu never used the space I gave the VirtualBox vdisk. Now I know why. Many thanks!
Thanks for a great post. In step 2, after running ‘n’, it prompts whether to delete a signature. I choose to retain the signature, and approach works as expected.
@Sid: It is very important that the start cylinder is the exactly the same. If the free space is anywhere but immediately after the partition you need to use another method (which would require booting from another drive)
Two Methods
1. Tested in Ubuntu Server 16.04 to 18.10
After extending the volume in VMware ESXi (shutdown vm, backup/export vm, remove all snapshots, then increased number in disk size, take snapshot of vm again before following the next steps so you can revert mistake/error).
The following example is extending volume on root partition on a system that is already using LVM.
# fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 20 GiB, 21474836480 bytes, 41943040 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: 0xc8b647ff Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sda1 * 2048 999423 997376 487M 83 Linux /dev/sda2 1001470 16775167 15773698 7.5G 5 Extended /dev/sda3 16775168 41943039 25167872 12G 8e Linux LVM (***** See new partition /dev/sda3*****) /dev/sda5 1001472 16775167 15773696 7.5G 8e Linux LVM # pvcreate /dev/sda3 Physical volume "/dev/sda3" successfully created # vgdisplay --- Volume group --- VG Name linuxetc1-vg (***** this is vg i'm extending*****) System ID Format lvm2 Metadata Areas 1 Metadata Sequence No 3 VG Access read/write VG Status resizable MAX LV 0 Cur LV 2 Open LV 2 Max PV 0 Cur PV 1 Act PV 1 VG Size 7.52 GiB PE Size 4.00 MiB Total PE 1925 Alloc PE / Size 1925 / 7.52 GiB Free PE / Size 0 / 0 . # vgextend linuxetc1-vg /dev/sda3 Volume group "linuxetc1-vg" successfully extended # lvextend -l+100%FREE /dev/linuxetc1-vg/root Size of logical volume linuxetc1-vg/root changed from 6.52 GiB (1669 extents) to 18.52 GiB (4741 extents). Logical volume root successfully resized. Or if you only wanted to give 5 more GB to root # lvextend -L +5g /dev/linuxetc1-vg/root # df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on udev 477M 0 477M 0% /dev tmpfs 100M 4.6M 95M 5% /run /dev/mapper/linuxetc1--vg-root 6.3G 2.5G 3.5G 42% / (***** this line*****) tmpfs 497M 0 497M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock tmpfs 497M 0 497M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/sda1 472M 105M 343M 24% /boot tmpfs 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user/1000 # resize2fs /dev/mapper/linuxetc1--vg-root resize2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015) Filesystem at /dev/mapper/linuxetc1--vg-root is mounted on /; on-line resizing required old_desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 2 The filesystem on /dev/mapper/linuxetc1--vg-root is now 4854784 (4k) blocks long. # df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on udev 477M 0 477M 0% /dev tmpfs 100M 4.6M 95M 5% /run /dev/mapper/linuxetc1--vg-root 19G 2.5G 15G 15% / (***** this line*****) tmpfs 497M 0 497M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock tmpfs 497M 0 497M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/sda1 472M 105M 343M 24% /boot tmpfs 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user/1000 2. Faster Method Tested in Ubuntu Server 18.04.3 LTS
This method is a little faster than the first. This is due to a new option in the cfdisk menu called «Resize» that saves some steps.
After extending the volume in VMware ESXi (shutdown vm, backup/export vm, remove all snapshots, then increased number in disk size, take snapshot of vm again before following the next steps so you can revert mistake/error).
The following example is extending volume on root partition on a system that is already using LVM.
- ssh into the system, switch to root and run cfdisk .
- Choose the partition to extend and select «Resize».
- Set the «New size».
- After pressing enter, you’ll see screen with the following note «Partition [someNumber] resized»:
- Next you’ll need to «Write» (save) your changes:
- Quit cfdisk . When you exit you may see message «syncing disks».
- I rebooted my system at this point but it may not be necessary. Now you can pickup from step 19 from the first method (repeated below).
- (19) Get filesystem name for next step
# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on udev 477M 0 477M 0% /dev tmpfs 100M 4.6M 95M 5% /run /dev/mapper/linuxetc1--vg-root 6.3G 2.5G 3.5G 42% / (***** this line*****) tmpfs 497M 0 497M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock tmpfs 497M 0 497M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/sda1 472M 105M 343M 24% /boot tmpfs 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user/1000 # resize2fs /dev/mapper/linuxetc1--vg-root resize2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015) Filesystem at /dev/mapper/linuxetc1--vg-root is mounted on /; on-line resizing required old_desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 2 The filesystem on /dev/mapper/linuxetc1--vg-root is now 4854784 (4k) blocks long. # df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on udev 477M 0 477M 0% /dev tmpfs 100M 4.6M 95M 5% /run /dev/mapper/linuxetc1--vg-root 19G 2.5G 15G 15% / (***** this line*****) tmpfs 497M 0 497M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock tmpfs 497M 0 497M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/sda1 472M 105M 343M 24% /boot tmpfs 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user/1000 How to effectively extend the root partition without resizing it?
Because, of course, the obvious way to have a larger root partition is to resize and thereby expand it. Now my problem is that I have the root partition, the home partition, and some unallocated space in that exact order:
Now a probable solution is to back-up my /home partition, remove it, resize root, place /home back, and hope for the best. However, I am scared that this might break my installation as the new /home partition will have a different UUID and maybe other stuff I am not aware of.
Another solution I could think of would be to have multiple partitions which act as root, but apparently that is impossible.
Roughly the same question has been asked here, but the answer to that question is unsatisfactory to me as «yes» does not exactly describe how to do so (as well as ‘bad stuff’ being undefined). So my question is: What is the best way to (effectively) enlarge my root partition, without losing my data in /home and/or breaking the system?
3 Answers 3
/usr and /var typically use up the most space in the root directory. if you have a lot of third party software, /opt may be quite large also.
It is possible to make partitions that mount to these directories in the same manner that /home mounts to the root directory.
That said, it is easier to boot from a live CD/USB and move the /home partition as in mentioned in the comments.
Of course, back up important data before doing either operation.