Resize Partition on VPS – How to Resize Partition on Debian VPS Without Losing Data

debianpartition

I have small VPS server with 40 GB disk space. I bought extra 40 GB and now I would like to extend / partition size.

My partitions looks like this:

/dev/vda1 is /boot and /dev/vda5 is my /. My VPS provider added /dev/vda2. I'm not sure if this is correct but I've tried to remove /dev/vda5 and /dev/vda2 and create /dev/vda5 but I don't have that option, I only can re-create devices with ID 2-4 and not 5 where my / is.

Best Answer

There is a utility named growpart that will safely grow partitions once your provider has expanded your virtual disk. The only trick in your case is that they have unnecessarily created an extended/logical DOS partition when it was not needed. Thus you will have to resize the extended partition, then the logical one it contains.

sudo apt install cloud-guest-utils

The growpart utility accepts the disk and partition number as separate arguments, so to resize /dev/vda2 you will write:

sudo growpart /dev/vda 2

Resize the extended partition /dev/vda2 first, then resize /dev/vda5 the same way.

sudo growpart /dev/vda 2
sudo growpart /dev/vda 5

Now you should be able to resize your filesystem. If it is ext4 then resize2fs /dev/vda5 will work. For XFS, use xfs_growfs /.

Related Solutions

Linux – Ubuntu: Resize the root LVM(2?) partition

In general, here's how to resize LVM volumes:

Let's say /mountpoint is on /dev/VolGroup00/mountpoint. You can find this out by checking out /etc/fstab or by running mount -l.

You may also need to resize the actual Physical Volume, depending on your setup. Use pvdisplay to find out if it's big enough, and use pvresize (much like lvresize below) if necessary.

umount /mountpoint
lvresize -L +<HOW MUCH BIGGER> /dev/VolGroup00/mountpoint
e2fsck -f /dev/VolGroup00/mountpoint
resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/mountpoint <TOTAL SIZE>
mount /mountpoint

This amounts to umounting, resizing the underlying LVM, then resizing the actual ext3 partition.

A few things to be careful of:

Obviously playing with / will be different from a data partition. You may need a boot disk such as Sysrescuecd instead of Doing It Live. Also see Kristof's comment below -- you may actually be able to do this without unmounting /.
lvresize has a few different syntax options, and reducing a logical volume will probably harm the overlaying partition. Consult your local man pages for more information.

Expand root partition without LVM

Your life will be MUCH easier if you move things off of your root partition onto another mountpoint rather than trying to expand /dev/sda1.

If you really want to expand it with your current setup, you'll pretty much be doing the equivalent of a backup/restore.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Ubuntu: Resize the root LVM(2?) partition

Expand root partition without LVM

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