Red Hat Knowledgebase

It is possible to resize an ext2 or ext3 filesystem in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

Currently the only way to do so is by using the ext2online command. This can only be done when the filesystem is online (mounted) and where the the filesystem is on a resizable logical volume. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 sets up the root filesystem (/) on LVM2 logical volumes by default during system installation.

It may be necessary to add physical volumes to the logical volumes and the volume group, as well as extend the logical volume before resizing the filesystem.

Also note that there are restrictions on what you are able to do with the ext2online program:

• Currently you can only increase the size of the filesystem. It is not possible to reduce a filesystem's size
• The filesystem currently may be increased in size by the order of 1000. For example an original filesystem created at 100MB in size can only be increased up to 1000 times it's original size:

  100MB x 1000 = 100000MB