Hi BOF,

> Has anyone tried resizing an existing ext3 partition under KRUD/RH7.3? I 
> have two that I need to resize, as they are getting full and I have a 
> lot of space on another which I will probably never use.

> If so, would you relate what you used and how it went.

Yes.  This works fine.  We have a XIOtech MAGNITUDE SAN storage 
controller with a Linux system hooked up to it.  The procedure to 
increase the size of an ext2/ext3 filesystem is as follows.

Note that decreasing the size of a filesystem is not supported.
This was done under Red Hat 7.2 with 2.4.9 kernel, I think.

1. Unmount the filesystem.  Unload the fiberchannel (SCSI) card
	device driver (rmmod).
2. Increase the size of the block device on the SAN controller.
3. Reload the fiberchannel driver so the block device is available
	to the kernel again.
3. Run a full e2fsck on the filesystem.
4. Run fdisk to change the partition so that the begin and
	end cylinders are 1 and max_cyl.  Write the new partition
	table to the disk.
5. Run resize2fs on the partition.  IIRC it prompts you for what
	to do.
6. I think you have to do another full e2fsck.

There's no guarantee this is exactly what we did, but I know we
did something like that, and it did work.  YMMV.

For most systems, the hard part is #2, since physical hard disk
drives don't have a resize option.  The MAGNITUDE virtualizes the
storage so you can do whatever you want and it's all in software,
and the server just believes whatever the MAGNITUDE says it has.

If you just have a hard drive, chances are the whole thing is
partitioned.  If you have some partitions and you want to
increase the size of one of the middle partitions, you have to
blow away the partitions that are "after" that one so you have
the cylinders available for resizing.

For $85,000 XIOtech (www.xiotech.com) will sell you a MAGNITUDE.
It's nifty!  (Actually it is probably less than that if you don't
buy the whole SAN fabric switched environment.)

Hope this helps...

--
Jim Ockers (ockers@ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/

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