Resizing a partition

[Robert Locke]

On Fri, 2005-01-28 at 10:05 +1100, Lucas Chan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I recently signed up with a super-cheap dedicated server company to run one
> of my personal sites.  The box was pre-installed with FC2.
> 
> Some of the partitions they set up on it are ridiculously small.  I
> contacted them saying:
> 
> "I'm quickly running out of space on a couple of partitions and need them to
> be resized. I understand this needs to be performed at the console with a
> boot disk so I'm submitting a ticket to you guys."
> 
> They responded saying:
> 
> "We cannot resize the partitions without reformatting/reimaging the drive."
> 
> Am I missing something obvious?  I thought resizing partitions was quite an
> easy thing to do with parted?  Are there some oddities with resizing
> partitions in Fedora that I'm not aware of, or am I just getting the quality
> technical support you'd expect from an el-cheapo hosting company?
> 
> The RHEL parted docs I found indicate to me that this is a simple process:
> 
> http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-3-Manual/sysadmin-guide/s
> 1-parted-resize-part.html
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> Regards,
>  
> Lucas Chan
> 
> 

Lucas,

Just looked at that doc page for the first time.  Talk about over
simplification......

Here's the gist.  Partition tables are intended to represent partitions
in a contiguous sense.  I.e. if you have five partitions taking up most
of the drive, but have some extra "unallocated" space (it will reside at
the end of the drive), if you want to grow the middle partition, you
need to move the partitions that follow it out of the way.  Now the idea
of parted is that it may help you to do this in that it can "copy,
resize, move" partitions.

But now things become even more fun.  It is not just about changing the
size of the underlying partition, but also about changing
references/pointers within the filesystem.  The default filesystem for
RHEL3 and for Fedora has been ext3.  parted is capable of resizing ext2
filesystems, but is having problems with the "updated" ext3 filesystems
introduced in RHEL3 and FC1 (see bugzilla for details).

I understand that some people, through much more involved, careful work,
have been able to use parted to resize things but I've been told the
methodologies are less than intuitive for a "newbie".  In other words,
one false move, and bye-bye data.

This all boils down to, for flexibility in resizing, we should implement
LVM.  With LVM, the disk space is virtualized such that the underlying
logical volume does not need to be contiguously stored on the physical
disk/volume.

So since they are going to play the backup/reformat/reimage card, you
may want to suggest that they convert the machine to LVM to support
future flexibility....

--Rob