how to resize/grow an existing partition

[Les Mikesell]

Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> 
>>>> My laptop running Fedora 7 had a 100G SATA drive. I went out yesterday and
>>>> purchased a 320G drive.
>>>>
>>>> First I used dd to transfer my entire existing drive to the new drive, it
>>>> worked perfectly - I'm typing this on my system via the new drive now.
>>> Maybe I'm missing something here, but I have to ask why did you do
>>> this? It would presumably have been easier to a) format your new
>>> drive and then b) copy all your files to it (using cp, tar, cpio,
>>> rsync or whatever). I can't see how copying via dd makes any sense
>>> in this context.
>> if (and i stress, *if*) dd works, i'm guessing it's going to be *much*
>> faster since it's working at the raw device level rather than having
>> to go through the filesystem layer.  personally, i'd probably waste
>> the extra time with a filesystem-level tool but, if it worked for the
>> OP, i'll bet it took a lot less time.
> 
> "Premature optimization is the root of all evil". He's only doing it
> once, so dd being faster is (within reason) irrelevant. And now he has
> to waste a lot of time asking the list how to expand his partition
> (useful knowledge I'll admit, but still), *and* wait for some tool to
> actually do it.

It's a trade-off though.  Dd copies the old stuff too precisely, 
preserving the old size. The file oriented tools (tar/cpio/cp) don't 
copy precisely enough so instead he would be wondering about filesystem 
labels, boot loaders, and probably SELinux re-labeling before he could 
get the new copy to run.  At least he is running now.

>> on the downside, since the newer drive was much larger, i'm guessing
>> he managed to make 220G of new disk space inaccessible (unless he did
>> something clever he didn't tell us about).
> 
> Exactly. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".

Isn't this precisely the reason that the system defaults to installing 
on LVM now?  The old-school way would have been to create a new 
partition and filesystem in the new space and mount it as /home or 
something.  I thought the point of LVM was that you could grow it - and 
then the filesystem(s) it contains more or less non-destructively.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com