4 Resizing a partition

It is best to resize a partition that is not mounted. As a result, you need to boot the VM with the live CD. You can download the ISO image from http://power.arc.losrios.edu/ auyeunt/debinstaller.iso. Be sure to specify this to be the image to use with the -cdrom option. Also, use -boot d to make the VM boot from the CD drive.

Select “Live” (the first option) from the installer CD. This will start up Linux in the VM without mounting the hard disk image file.

To extend the file system in a partition, we need to first extend the partition. There is no easy way to do this. Following these steps carefully:

• First, execute the following command:
  sudo fdisk /dev/hda

• In fdisk, execute the following commands:
  • d
    This command deletes the first (and only) partition. Don’t worry, the data is still there, only the partition entry is removed.
  • n
    This command creates a new partition. Select p to specify a primary partition, then 1 to select the first primary partition.
  • Then, specify 1 as the First cylinder (which is the default), and the default as the Last cylinder. fdisk automatically tries to allocate as much space as possible.
  • w
    This command writes the modified partition back to the hard disk drive. If you made a mistake, you can stop here and type q instead of w, and no harm will be done to the hard disk drive. This steps concludes the partition resize operation.

The previous command changes the size of the partition to use the entire hard disk. However, the file system still does not “know” about the extra space available. Before we extend the file system, we should first make sure the original file system is intact. You can do this using the following command:

To actually extend the file system to match the size of the partition, you need to use the following command.

This step may take a little bit of time. However, after a bit of waiting, the whole procedure is done!