All our servers have a Cloud Init service included, this service is responsible for various tasks such as changing passwords, updating hostname, etc. It also takes care of extending our partition when a disk resize is done. If you have migrated your server from another platform or have deleted the Cloud Init service, when resizing, you must extend the partition manually, in this article we explain how to do it on Linux, you can consult the Windows article.
How to extend partitions on Linux
In order to extend the partition, enter your server through SSH and execute:
# growpart /dev/sda 1 # Extends partition; does not change the filesystem
You can check that the size of the partition has increased by executing:
# sfdisk -l
It will return a result similar to:
Disk /dev/sda: 100 GiB, 107374182400 bytes, 209715200 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x566d4019 Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sda1 * 2048 209715166 209713119 100G 83 Linux
To extend the filesystem
# resize2fs /dev/sda1 # Extends the filesystem
You can check that the size of the filesystem has increased by executing:
# df -h
It will return a result similar to:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 487M 0 487M 0% /dev
tmpfs 100M 9.1M 91M 10% /run /dev/sda1 99G 1.1G 94G 2% / tmpfs 496M 0 496M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock tmpfs 496M 0 496M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user/0
How to extend partition in pfSense
To extend the partition on a pfsense server, you can use the growfs service directly:
# service growfs onestart
It will perform the extension process automatically upon startup.
Error cases
If during the process of extending the partition, you get errors, there is probably a problem with the partition of your server. In order to fix it, execute “fsck” to check and repair errors.
For example, on Linux you might encounter this error:
resize2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015) Filesystem at /dev/sda1 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required old_desc_blocks = 4, new_desc_blocks = 7 resize2fs: Permission denied to resize filesystem