Prerequisites:
You
will need to download the GParted live CD ISO file so that you can use it
later, you can get this here.
Below
is an image displaying disk information on the server before we begin.
It is important to identify that you are actually using a Linux native
partition – as this is what we are extending. As you can see in the above image
/dev/sda1 is listed as “Linux” and it has the ID of 83. The 83 hex code shows
that it is a Linux native partition, while 8e shows a Linux LVM.
Note
that /dev/sda1 is the partition we will be expanding.
Increasing
the virtual hard disk
First
off we increase the allocated disk space on the virtual machine itself.
Booting
into the GParted Live CD
Now
we are ready to power on the virtual machine.
Once
the virtual machine has powered on and you have booted to the CD, you will be
presented with the following menu, just press enter to boot into GParted Live
(Default Settings).
After
some time you will then arrive at the following screen, for this I did not
change anything and just accepted the defaults by pressing enter.
You
will then be prompted to select a language, pressing enter defaults to English.
Next
we select the default option 0 by pressing enter as we will be working with the
GUI.
Once
complete you will be presented with the GUI with GParted already open, if it is
not already open you can select it from the Desktop icon.
As
you can see the original /dev/sda1 partition that is making use of the 20gb
disk is there, as well as the new unallocated 10gb from when we increased the
size of the virtual hard disk earlier. The space between the two is the swap
space. The total /dev/sda disk size of 30gb is also shown.
What
needs to be done now is get /dev/sda1 to take up that unallocated space, this
is not currently possible because swap is in the way so we need to move things
around. If you do not have swap in between the partition to be extended and the
unallocated space then you will be able to skip down a few steps until you
arrive at the image where /dev/sda1 and the unallocated space are next to each
other.
First
we select /dev/sda2 which is the extended partition containing the swap, we
want to expand this to include the 10gb of unallocated space.
Select
/dev/sda2 and click “Resize/Move” and you will be presented with the following.
Basically
you just need to drag the black arrow of /dev/sda2 all the way to the end of
the unallocated space and click the Resize/Move button.
After
doing this, you should see /dev/sda2 (represented by the blue box) spread out
over the unallocated space.
This
change and all further changes will not yet be applied, you can see the tasks
down the bottom of the GParted interface and these will be applied only once
you click the Apply button. Alternatively you can click the Undo button to
remove a pending change.
This
time we want to select /dev/sda5 which is the swap partition and select
Resize/Move, this will result in the following.
This
time rather than expanding the partition, we want to just move swap all the way
to the end of the /dev/sda2 space that it is in, this is done by just dragging
the box to the end which will then look like this.
Click
the Resize/Move button and then a warning may appear informing you that moving
a partition might cause your operating system to fail to boot. It also warns
that performing this move may take a long time to apply, read the warning then
click OK to continue.
The
GUI should now look something like the below image, where /dev/sda1 is located
right next to /dev/sda2 which contains the unallocated space.
Select
the /dev/sda2 extended partition and click Resize/Move.
Drag
this to the right so that only the swap space is contained and the grey
unallocated space is freed, click Resize/Move once complete.
Once
this is complete the disk will look like this.
Now
we have /dev/sda1 next to the unallocated space so we are finally ready to
expand /dev/sda1. Select /dev/sda1 and click the Resize/Move button.
You
will be able to perform this action straight away if you did not have swap in
between /dev/sda1 and the unallocated space, the previous steps were to get
swap out of the way in GParted.
Drag
the arrow over so that the unallocated space is then consumed by /dev/sda1 as
shown below, then click Resize/Move.
Once
this is done the /dev/sda1 partition will now be using the unallocated space
that was previously there. All that is left to do is click the apply button
which will apply the changes – you will be prompted to confirm with a warning
that data loss may occur.
Note
that this may take a while depending on how much of the disk is currently in
use and the amount of disk space you are increasing, because a file system
check (fsck) is run before the expansion and after it to ensure that there are
no issues. I have performed this method on a 400gb server in the past and to
increase it 100gb took approximately 5 hours. In this example I am only
increasing by 10gb and there is only about 1gb of data on the disk so this took
approximately 2 minutes to finish applying.
Once
complete you will see something similar to the below image, you will be able to
click close once finished.
Everything
is now finished, you just need to reboot the virtual machine and then boot from
disk rather than CD, alternatively shut down the virtual machine and unmount
the live CD and then power it back on.
Once
the operating system has booted you can confirm that the disk space has
expanded correctly. Below you can see that /dev/sda1 is now 30gb in size.
