Bdtyktl

Continue on your own risk

(Please, go to the next section if you want a more secure method to resize ext partitions)

The tool you are looking for is parted which is the backend for gparted, also you must make sure that your partition table is GPT, if it's MBR it won't support partitions bigger than 2TB.

This method is only for non-mounted partitions, so you might like to do a backup too if something go wire.

• 
  

  First open parted

  
  
  

  braiam@bt:~$ sudo parted
  
  [sudo] password for braiam: 
  
  GNU Parted 2.3
  
  Using /dev/sda
  
  Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
  
  (parted) 
  
  

  
  


• 
  

  Now that you are here, you must make sure what driver you want to modify. As you see, I'm using sda, if what you want is use sdb or sd-something you must use select:

  
  
  

  (parted) select                                                           
  
  New device?  [/dev/sda]? /dev/sd                                          
  
  sda   sda1  sda2  sda3  sda4  sda5  sda6  sda7  sda8  sdb   sdc   sdd   sde   sdf   sdf1  sdf2  
  
  New device?  [/dev/sda]? /dev/sdf
  
  Using /dev/sdf
  
  (parted)
  
  

  
  


• 
  

  List all the partitions with print /dev/sdf:

  
  
  

  (parted) print /dev/sdf
  
  Model: SanDisk Cruzer (scsi)
  
  Disk /dev/sdf: 8040MB
  
  Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
  
  Partition Table: msdos
  
  
  
  Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
  
   1      32.8kB  2418MB  2418MB  primary               boot, hidden
  
   2      2418MB  8039MB  5621MB  primary  ntfs
  
  

  
  
  

  Let assume that my NTFS partition is empty for now. Now I want to grow partition number one (notice that my partition table says msdos in your case it should say gpt).

  
  


• 
  

  Now comes the truth hour. Using resize we must set the partition number one to use all the disk, how we do this?

  
  
  

  
  

  resize NUMBER START END resize partition NUMBER and its file system

  
  

  
  
  

  Hence, number should be 1, start should be the same 32.8kB and the end should be 8039MB (remember that you should change the numbers, since I don't have a >1TB drive).

  
  
  

  resize 1 32.8kB 8039MB
  
  WARNING: you are attempting to use parted to operate on (resize) a file system.
  
  parted's file system manipulation code is not as robust as what you'll find in
  
  dedicated, file-system-specific packages like e2fsprogs.  We recommend
  
  you use parted only to manipulate partition tables, whenever possible.
  
  Support for performing most operations on most types of file systems
  
  will be removed in an upcoming release.
  
  

  
  

Nice warning, continue reading.

The recommended method? e2fsprogs? but I don't have that!

Seems that the message is quite old, and e2fsprogs is not called like that anymore (the package keep its name, through), but resize2fs. This program is capable of resize any ext2/3/4 filesystem. Cool! Now how I do it? Simple:

sudo resize2fs /dev/sdf1 8039M

(Remember that the size is the current size + the size you want to add)

Here you could use M for Megabytes, G for Gigabytes. You should also verify for errors:

sudo e2fsck -f -p /dev/sdf1

Done.

The trick here is to use an Xserver on another machine to display the GUI elements you can't see on a server. Set the environment variable to the local machine running the Xserver. Where this is an IP address and the screen # on the X server.

export DISPLAY="192.168.1.5:0"

then run :

sudo gparted 

With another Ubuntu machine you will need to change firewall rules to allow this. Using windows you can do this with MobaXterm which runs a local X server.

As David pointed out, gparted is a gui application, so you won't be able to use it on a server without a gui. You will need to use parted to manipulate partitions on the command line. It can not directly resize partitions however. Instead you will have to delete the existing partition and recreate it with the exact same start position, but a longer length, and then run another tool to resize the filesystem inside the partition.

First you need to put it into sector mode with the unit s command and print the existing table. Use rm 1 to remove the partition, then mkpart to create a new one. Specify the same starting sector it had before, then specify the end. You can do that in a form like "+2500G" for 2,500 GB from the start rather than having to specify the exact sector. quit when done, then run sudo resize2fs /dev/sda1. This is assuming the partition is number 1 on the first disk in the system.

If the partition is mounted at the time, then in 12.04 you will get an error trying to change it with parted and will have to reboot for the change to take effect before using resize2fs.

gparted is a graphical application for managing partitions.

The error you see above is because gparted is trying to open a graphical console, but since this is Ubuntu server there is no graphical display.

Some options:

You can use command line partitioning tools such as fdisk or sfdisk. These are harder to drive, so read the manual carefully.

Alternately, if you have another machine running ubuntu desktop, you can use ssh -X from that machine to the server to log in with X11 forwarding. In that shell you can run gparted and it should display on the desktop machine - although you will probably have to tweak the ssh configs a bit and install some X11 programs on the server to get it all working.

Is simple, put this commands in console:

sudo touch .Xauthority  

sudo xauth merge ~name_of_user/.Xauthority  

export DISPLAY=:0.0  

sudo gparted

*change name_of_user to your login user

I was having same trouble. The error message said I was in trouble because of some 'MIT-Magic-Cookie-1'. None of the above advice helped, but I figured out it was all about root, server and desktop complications, because I had an upgrade from zesty to artful before. Some packages were removed of course.

Here is what solved my problem:

1. Create user root.


2. Login as user root, ...this worked out for me pressing the keyboard combination Ctrl+Alt+F2


3. From the terminal simply: startx


4. Super key and look for GParted.

I believe this is an ideal solution to switch between the X-server and wayland/mir. If you want to return back to your previous account, logout from X Window and terminal, press Ctrl+Alt+F1.