Increase OR decrease the size of the static partition in linux>-

6 min readAug 24, 2021

Static V/S Dynamic Partitioning

💁🏻‍♀️In most cases, we can use dynamic partitioning. It provides us a lot of flexibility. The following table will help you understand the difference between Static and dynamic partitioning.

For all the concepts of LVM do refer to my previous blog also: https://gulshachawla.medium.com/integration-of-lvm-with-hadoop-cluster-using-aws-cloud-66edc98992cd

Let’s move towards the practical part👇🏻

Firstly we will add a new external hard disk of let’s say 20GB

To add an external H.D go to

Settings=>Storage=>Add hard disk

Then click here

Then tap next

Again tap next

Now give a name to your new H.D & specify a size you wish for it.

Here our H.D is created but still, it is not attached to our VM or RHEL8 O.S.

To attach just click on choose that’s it our H.D name & size you specified will pop-up there tap ok! as you can see in above snapshot.

Now it’s time to go inside o.s & do this task🙌

Step 1: Check & verify new H.D attached or not

We will check & verify by using : #fdisk -l

Step 2: To create a partition, format & mount.

For partition, we will go inside this H.D so we will use: #fdisk /dev/sdd here to create a new partition press n then as we are first time creating partition i.e primary partition press p hit enter size let’s say of 10GB and to save it press w that’s it our partition of 10GB /dev/sdd1 is created.

Now as we are using RHEL8 O.S we need to load a driver so that user can interact with this H.D storage by using: #udevadm settle

Then we need to format this partition using: #mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdd1

After this, we will mount this partition

Firstly we will create a directory or folder using: #mkdir /folder-name

So to mount we will use: #mount /partition-name /folder-name

Then using: #df -h or #lsblk command we can verify it is successfully mounted.

Step 3: Increase OR Decrease the size of the static partition in Linux

Here before I do partition I will make text files to prove that after I increase or decrease my partition storage it won’t lose my data.

Now we will do unmount of folder we created earlier to increase its storage i.e static storage using command #umount /gc_LVM

Then we will delete the partition by pressing d using the command

: #fdisk /hard-disk-name

For creating a partition of 15GB, I am increasing storage by 5GB more here n is for the new partition and to save it press w.

Have you noticed??👀 Before increasing static partition it asked me Yes Or No? & it is telling partition #1 contains an ext4 signature what does it mean??🧐

📍So, the signature of partition is basically a mark/beacon there is something there, and it is not empty. It may also identify a partition.

📍It is useful in the context of several utilities/OS to tell the partition has already data there.

📍Moving a partition size/recreating a partition is usually a non-destructive operation up to the point before formatting it.

📍So a signature warning is signaling you “There is already data here!…are you sure you want to go ahead?”

📍Each disk and partition has some sort of signature and metadata/magic strings on it. The metadata is used by an operating system to configure disks or attach drivers and mount disks on your system.

📍As for removing it or not, it depends on whether you are for instance resizing a partition or creating a new partition. If you are creating a new partition, obviously you may want to remove the signature, if you are resizing a partition you surely want to keep it so I pressed here w to keep this signature as it contains my data i.e text files we created earlier.

But here a challenge comes in scenario🤔 I know I have somewhere my data files but how to retrieve them back?🤨

So for that, I repaired my partition table or inode table i.e Clean & Scan if any badly corrupted files, data…etc it will remove using command :#e2fsck -f /dev/sdd1 here full form of this command is extended to(2) file system clean check & -f means forcefully clean it.

As we had earlier formatted 10GB now let’s re-format this 5GB more data by using command #resize2fs /dev/sdd1 here we didn’t use mkfs.ext4 to re-format it will lose my data and so I used resize2fs as it is part of ext4 format-type also it won’t lose my data. In ext4 format type, we can extend & reduce the size of the partition.

Sometimes we have big commands we need to again & again manually run them but here I have some small trick or way💡 without manually typing within a go we can run that big command so go to history=>check command line-number=>!command-number run it! that’s it we again ran the same big command without more typing…here I did re-mount using #mount /partition-name /folder-name.