How to extend partition size in linux(ubuntu 9.04)?

I am using Ubuntu 9.04 in vmware for my programming purpose. I previously had 12GB of virtual harddisk, my partition scheme was as follows,

8GB Primary Partition for (/)

2GB logical extended partition for home

2GB logical extended partition for swap

Now I need 20 GB more space for my (/) Partition. So I added 20GB to my virtual harddisk so now, my partition scheme was as follows,

8GB Primary Partition for (/)

2GB logical extended partition for home

2GB logical extended partition for swap

20GB unpartotioned space.

can you please tell me is it possible to make my Primary partition (/) to 28 GB, If yes tell me how?

It would be great if you can tell me some GUI software, otherwise for commandline please elaborate little more. :)

Thanks.

SunnyShah

Posted 2009-10-21T18:37:00.010

Reputation: 247

Answers

You can increase the size of the virtual machine's disk capacity with the command-line tools provided with VMWare:

/usr/bin/vmware-vdiskmanager -x 28GB /path/to/VM_Name.vmdk

replacing /path/to/VM_Name.vmdk with the path & name of your virtual disk file.

Then, increase the virtual disk with a GParted bootable ISO (boot from it with the VM).

Full guide found here.

John T

Posted 2009-10-21T18:37:00.010

Reputation: 149 037

Thanks you very much for your answer John T. I have one question that is there are two extended logical partitions between free space and / partition, How can I join first and last partition. – SunnyShah – 2009-10-21T18:59:28.730

You can move the partitions and then merge them with the partition you want to expand. – John T – 2009-10-21T19:18:52.123

It worked. Downloaded GParted bootable iso, moved other partitions. increase size of root partition. Thank you very much for introducing me to such a useful tool. – SunnyShah – 2009-10-21T21:18:52.973

Move /home and /swap to separate virtual disks (VMDKs). There's no reason to keep them on the same VMDK; virtual disks aren't a scarce resource!

This also gives you a bit more flexibility -- you can put /home and /swap on different storage, for example.

You will need to edit /etc/fstab to change the lines for /home and /swap to point at the new disks. If you look at /etc/fstab, you will see lines like

/dev/sda2     /home   ext3   (various options)
/dev/sda3     none    swap   (various options)

If you move /home to disk #2 and swap to disk #3, change /dev/sda2 to /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sda3 to /dev/sdc1.

Note that if you used LVM for your disks you would not have this problem; LVM logical volumes do not need to be contiguous on disk (or even on the same disk!)

Captain Segfault

Posted 2009-10-21T18:37:00.010

Reputation: 1 224

Upvoted for mentioning LVM. – Joe Internet – 2009-10-21T20:44:36.927

This would have been "Switch to LVM" if it weren't for this being a VM. For a VM this is better than LVM. – Captain Segfault – 2009-10-21T23:27:42.480