How to Increase or Decrease the Size of Static Partition in Linux.

In the last blog, we've discussed how can we increase the size of the partition using Logical Volume Management, but what if we have data stored in a static partition which is not from a Volume group, then we cannot take space from the volume group.

So, here we goona increase the size of a static partition and for this, we're going to use AWS instance with 5GB EBS (Elastic Block Storage) connected:-

To check all the Partitions and connected devices we use the command:-

fdisk -l

Here you can see 5GB storage is connected to the instance.

For now, we'll make a partition of 2GB and store some data on it, to create partition use command:-

fdisk <device name>

This will take you fdisk prompt just add +2G in option of last sector.

Now format the partition by using:-

mkfs.ext4 <device name>

Now after formatting the partition, it's time to mount the partition on some folder, so I've created a folder name folder1 inside root directory and mount the partition to it.

To mount the folder:-

mount <partition name> <location>

This will mount the partition to the folder, to confirm the mount you can use the command:-

df -hT

Here you can see in the last /dev/xvdf1 is mounted to folder1 and consists of 2GB in size.

Now we add some data in the folder1 :-

Now we assume that our 2GB partition storage is full and we want to increase it so at first, we unmount the storage from folder1 by using command:-

umount /dev/xvdf1

We can confirm it again by using:-

df -hT

Now we delete the partition again by accessing the fdisk prompt.

partition delete.png

After the partition is deleted we again create a partition using fdisk with the same device name. But this time in the option of last section instead of +2GB we will give +4GB.

In the end, it will also ask you that partition contains an ext4 signature do you want to remove it. If you enter [y] it will remove all the data in the partition that we don't want to do, so enter [n].

Now check for any errors by using the command:-

e2fsck -f /dev/xvdf1

The size of the partiton is increased to 4GB but it is not formatted into ext4 format, so we use command:-

resize2fs /dev/xvdf1

This will format the new sectors into ext4 format, and now we can mount it back to the folder1 .

extended final.png Now here you can see the size of the our Partition is increased from 2GB to 4GB and also our data inside the old partition is safe.

Thank You