Ext2online

[Ivan Gyurdiev]

> My experience is that when you get the "block N not reserved" message it 
> is because you are attempting to increase the size of the filesystem 
> beyond what can be done online.

I doubt that, because I am trying to resize the root fs by 3-4G,
and earlier I resized my home fs by 10G without a problem.

> An EXT[2|3] filesystem, when created, has a hard limit on the size to 
> which it can grow while mounted - to grow beyond this size requires the 
> file system to be unmounted so that additional data structures can be 
> created within it. I believe the rule of thumb is that you can double 
> the size of the file system from what it was originally while it is 
> mounted, but you cannot go beyond that without unmounting it and 
> extending it.

In which case my resize should have worked... it's a minor increase,
about 25% of the current size.

> XFS does not have this restriction, and IIRC neither does ReiserFS.
> 
> So, the upshot is that the file system will have to be unmounted and 
> extended. If this is the rootfs then this will have to be done from a 
> rescue disk or from the initrd (what I have done is to create an initrd 
> that extends the partition to the maximum size of the partition it is 
> in, and then I can simply invoke that initrd when needed.)

I can try the rescue disk, but the "block reserved" message is not 
helpful at all when trying to determine the cause of the problem.

-- 
Ivan Gyurdiev <ivg2 at cornell.edu>
Cornell University