Increase or Decrease the Size of Static Partition in Linux.

4 min readNov 29, 2020

◆WHAT IS PARTITIONING OF HARD DISK?

It is the concept in which a given hard disk is divided into segments of secondary storage, so that each segment is managed separately. This is also done with a view that if damage is caused to one segment, like in cases of complete deletion of data, the damage is not transferred to the entire disk. It rather remains confined to that particular segment.

◆STATIC OR FIXED PARTITION

In this kind, the number of partitions in RAM are fixed , but the size of each partition may be same or may not be so. Click here to learn more about it.

◆MAJOR STEPS INVOLVED IN CREATING A PARTITION

Three major steps are involved are:

Create
Format
Mount

◆CREATING

You need to have a harddisk attached.

fdisk -l

This command shows you the list of all attached disks.

In the picture below, you can see I have a harddisk of size 10 GiB attached to my OS named /dev/xvdf.

fdisk <drive_name> , In my case fdisk /dev/xvdf

This command creates the partition for you. The ’n’ in the line

'Command (m for help):n' indicates that we are creating a new partition.

The hard disk is of size 10GB in total, But I want to make use of 3GB so I will input +3G.

w: to save the changes made to the partition.

FORMAT

mkfs.ext4 <drive_name>, In my case mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdf1

Above command is used to format the partition.

MOUNT

Create a new directory , I created /mangesh.

mount /dev/xvdf1 /mangesh

In order to mount the partition to /mangesh.

df -hT

To check the successful mounting of the partition.

cd /mangesh: change the directory.

Within the directory create a file , I created mangesh.txt.

Now comes our main task which is to increase or decrease the size of the static partition.

For accomplishing this task, we need to first unmount it , using command:

umount /mangesh

Confirm the same using df -hT.

e2fsck -f /dev/xvdf1

This command will check errors and will mark file system as clean.

RESIZE

resize2fs /dev/xvdf1 5G

The above command resizes my partition to 5GB.

After unmounting you can see that no files exist, but don’t worry your files are safe. It’s not yet visible because once unmounted you need to mount it again.

For getting your files back along with the increased size of the partition, we need to mount it again:

mount /dev/xvdf1 /mangesh

Now search for your files. Boom! your files are safe and the size has also increased from 3GB to 5GB.