changing the partition of a linux

Question

I have a ubuntu system as a virtual system on Virtual Box. It uses VHD as its hard disk. I manged to change the size of VHD using VHD resizer, now I want to expand the partition on vhd so it uses the expanded size. How can I do this?

Answer 1

Expanding a partition and filesystem size is fairly straightforward, but it will need to be done from inside a live environment, unless it's on LVM. LVM supports online resizing of partition.

From inside a live cd, you can uses parted or a parted front-end such as gparted. The partition that you are trying to resize must be at the end of the disk. Here is an example for a single partition setup that spans an entire disk:

parted /dev/sda1 resize 0 -1

Once the partition is extended, you still need to extend the filesystem. If it is ext2/3/4, you can use resize2fs. Here is an example:

resize2fs /dev/sda1

Without any options, resize2fs will extend a filesystem to use all available space on the partition.