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Pekka
Asked: 2013-01-29 07:45:00 +0800 CST

Trouble enlarging a lvm2 partition - "New size matches existing size"

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I have a VM running Ubuntu. It used to have 30GB of space; I need to increase the size of the data partition, a LVM2 one, to 50GB.

I changed the size in the VM's management console and this is what fdisk -l tells me:

Disk /dev/sda: 53.7 GB, 53687091200 bytes                      <--- new size

[...]

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          32      248832   83  Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2              32        6528    52177921    5  Extended  <--- huh?!?
/dev/sda5              32        3917    31205376   8e  Linux LVM <--- old size

[...]

I had read up plenty of stuff about LVM first, and ended up with this Serverfault question about resizing a LVM partition on the fly.

sda2 seems to be the container containing sda5, which if I understand LVM correctly is the way things should be.

However, when I try

sudo lvextend /dev/DOCS/root -l+100%FREE

I get

New size (7118 extents) matches existing size (7118 extents)

I don't fully grasp the concept of LVM yet. Do I need to enlarge something else first, like the "outer container" of the partition?

linux

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This has come op before:

    See this How to grow LVM and underlying partition? for a way to get the desired result without having to re-create the existing partition in fdisk.

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  2. You need to expand the partition (/dev/sda5) first. Go into fdisk, delete /dev/sda5, create a new extended partition (/dev/sda5 - it MUST be the same number as the old one), write the changes out and reboot. Then you can lvextend.

    Be careful - doing this wrong will lead to data loss.

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