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On Windows there is Dell's extpart which allows one to extend a basic system disk (NTFS) of a running system without downtime. It looks like this:

C:\>extpart.exe
ExtPart - Utility to extend basic disks (Build 1.0.4)
(c) Dell Computer Corporation 2003

Volume to extend (drive letter or mount point): c:
Current volume size : 66285 MB (69504860160 bytes)
Current partition size : 76285 MB (79990815744 bytes)
Size to expand the volume (MB): 76285

Boom done! No downtime, system disk is extended from within the OS that's running on the system disk. The above was copied from: Extending a Windows C:\ Dell EXTPart.

Is there an equivalent for a non-LVM ext3 Linux disk? This is for a lab environment, so the distro to use hasn't been selected yet, it will probably be based on a stripped down version of lubuntu which doesn't have Gnome but has the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) instead.

Reality Extractor
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  • Windows has been able to grow it's own system disk since Vista/2008; over 5 years ago. – Chris S May 04 '13 at 04:21
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    This -> "Windows has been able to grow it's own system disk since Vista/2008; over 5 years ago" I have been resizing ext3 root partitions on LVM since 2002. – Danila Ladner May 04 '13 at 04:23

1 Answers1

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An ext4 file system may be grown while mounted using the resize2fs command, as in: resize2fs /mount/point size

When resizing an ext4 file system, the resize2fs utility reads the size in units of file system block size, unless a suffix indicating a specific unit is used. The following suffixes indicate specific units:

s — 512kb sectors

K — kilobytes

M — megabytes

G — gigabytes

For more information about resizing an ext4 file system, refer to man resize2fs.

And if you are using LVM it is not only possible but rather easy, which now days all sane people do.

Danila Ladner
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