Partitions

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 13, 2014, at 2:29 PM, Doug <dmcgarrett at optonline.net> wrote:

> On 03/13/2014 12:20 PM, Hunter Jozwiak wrote:
>> Okay, found it. Now, it says that it is at 20006 megabytes, which I am
>> assuming is it's size. But, I can't move the number upwards to give it
>> more room. I went to the correct partition, clicked resize/move, and
>> that's where I found the current size. Is it because I am booted in to
>> Fedora that I can't modify the size?
>> 
>> On 3/13/14, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2014-03-13 at 11:27 -0400, Hunter Jozwiak wrote:
>>>> When I installed my Fedooa, I had a partion for /, /home, swap, and a
>>>> boot. Now, I need to grow my / partition, but when I go to Gparted, I
>>>> see /sda4. When I expand that, I have /sda5 and 6. But they don't have
>>>> no labels, so it is hard to discern which is which. Help would be
>>>> appreciated.
>>> man lsblk
>>> 
>>> poc
>>> 
> You cannot modify a mounted partition.

Technically you can modify both the partition table of a device that has a currently mounted partition; as well as you can modify the partition entry that is currently mounted. It's just that the kernel gets a bit fussy.

OK; writing new GUID partition table (GPT) to /dev/sdc.
Warning: The kernel is still using the old partition table.
The new table will be used at the next reboot.
The operation has completed successfully.

# partprobe
Error: Partition(s) 1 on /dev/sdc have been written, but we have been unable to inform the kernel of the change, probably because it/they are in use.  As a result, the old partition(s) will remain in use.  You should reboot now before making further changes.

And therefore I most definitely can't grow the file system on that modified partition. But once I reboot and the kernel has the correct idea of the partition, then I at least with XFS and Btrfs I can only grow them while mounted.

> If the partition you need to modify is part of your working system, you will have to
> use a live disk (GParted or PartedMagic [which contains GParted]) and modify the partitions from there.

So long as ext4 and XFS don't mind a smaller volume being on a larger partition at boot time, it's OK, just reboot and then resize online. I'm not sure that they're bothered by this. Btrfs definitely doesn't care, it even has mkfs options to explicitly make the volume smaller than the block device it's created on.


Chris Murphy