[Gllug] Changing the filesystem size of a live machine

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Mon, 2002-12-02 at 11:28, Neil Fryer wrote:
> Hi All
> 
> Is this possible? Basically what I want to do is change the size of my /tmp
> partition, as this is only 1 GB, and my /usr partition is 8 GB, so I want to
> take 3 GB from /usr, and add it on to /tmp, can this be done safely, and
> without rebooting the machine?

The short answer should be "no".

The longer answer is maybe. If you can arrange to unmount /usr and /tmp,
you can alter the partition layout, re-create the filesystems, replace
the contents, and re-mount new fs's. In practice, you'll have to
re-boot, as you need to force a re-read of the partition table. In
certain cases, you can grow a filesystem "in place" - when you have an
XFS filesystem on a partition, and the filesystem does not fill the
partition, you can use xfs_growfs on it, but that's of little use in the
absence of LVM.

If you're going to be doing this sort of thing with any frequency, you
should look at an LVM setup.

Mike.


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