Increase or Decrease the Size of Static Partition Without Losing Any Data

This Article explain how to increase/decrease the size of the static partition without losing data in Linux.

WHAT IS PARTITIONING OF HARD DISK?

It is the concept in which a given hard disk is divided into segments of secondary storage, so that each segment is managed separately. This is also done with a view that if damage is caused to one segment, like in cases of complete deletion of data, the damage is not transferred to the entire disk. It rather remains confined to that particular segment.

MAJOR STEPS INVOLVED IN CREATING A PARTITION

Three major steps are involved are:

• Create
• Format
• Mount

CREATING

You need to have a harddisk attached.

fdisk -l

This command shows you the list of all attached disks.

fdisk <drive_name> , In my case fdisk /dev/sdc

This command creates the partition for you. The ‘n’ in the line 'Command (m for help):n' indicates that we are creating a new partition.

The hard disk is of size 10GB in total, But I want to make use of 3GB so I will input +3G.

w: to save the changes made to the partition.

FORMATTING

mkfs.ext4 <drive_name>, In my case mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc1

Above command is used to format the partition.

MOUNTING

Create a new directory , I created /st1.

mount /dev/sdc1 /st1

In order to mount the partition to /st1.

df -hT

To check the successful mounting of the partition.

Within the directory create a file , I created dwi.txt.

Now comes our main task which is to increase or decrease the size of the static partition.

For accomplishing this task, we need to first unmount it , using command:

umount /st1

Now delete the partition:

And create partition again:

Now:

e2fsck -f /dev/sdc1

This command will check errors and will mark file system as clean.

Now format the remaining partition i.e. resized partition:

resize2fs /dev/sdc1

and mount to directory

mount /dev/sdc1 /st1

Here, we can see the previous file exist. so through this method we can increase the size of static partition.

Thank You!