Resizing a Debian linux partition without losing data

debian-wheezyopenvzpartedpartition

i have made by mistake a small partition partion on my Debian installation and after installing openvz on this bare metal server i notice that i created production vps on this partion and that it reached 100%

this is df -h result :

Sys. fich.        Taille Util. Dispo Uti% Monté sur
udev                 10M     0   10M   0% /dev
tmpfs               3,2G  352K  3,2G   1% /run
/dev/md2             20G   18G  179M 100% /
tmpfs               5,0M     0  5,0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs               6,5G     0  6,5G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/md3            1,8T  4,3G  1,7T   1% /home
/dev/ploop22956p1    25G  4,5G   20G  19% /var/lib/vz/root/1
/dev/ploop30467p1    25G  3,7G   20G  16% /var/lib/vz/root/2
/dev/ploop61065p1    25G  1,7G   22G   8% /var/lib/vz/root/4
/dev/ploop44786p1    25G  1,5G   22G   7% /var/lib/vz/root/5
/dev/ploop27624p1    25G  2,3G   22G  10% /var/lib/vz/root/3
/dev/ploop45115p1    25G  639M   23G   3% /var/lib/vz/root/6

i know that gnu parted can do this with resize command but i have never used it
and i don't want to risk it
is there anyway to do it without losing data ?

Best Answer

Yes you can, but just don't rely on it (i.e. back up your data first!).

The partitions should be adjacent, and for ease's sake you want to be expanding into a partition that comes AFTER the one you want to expand.

Then just use parted on the device, delete both partitions (e.g. sdb1, sdb2), create a new one that spans the entire space, and use resize2fs to grow the filesystem so that it's using all the available space.

I did this recently with some home data - I would NOT suggest doing it with your only copy of the important data.

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