Partitioning

by: tom

It came as a surprise to me to read that gnu parted should not be used to anything that involves file systems. This means among other things that resizing file systems using parted is not recommended. In ubuntu intrepid warnings about this is found under "Known Issues" in the manual for parted, but not in the info pages.

KNOWN ISSUES
       ext3  filesystem  resizing does not currently work,
       please use resize2fs(8) instead.

       Resizing partitions with an  ext3  filesystem  will
       not generally work because of the above issue.  Use
       resize2fs(8) to resize the  filesystem  and  resize
       the  partition manually using fdisk(8) or a similar
       tool.  For LVM situations, you will need to use the
       LVM commands to resize the LVM elements.

The reason why ext3 filesystem resizing does not currently work is found in parted's development mailing list. From parted-devel:

As long as the bit-rotten ext* code remains, using Parted to manipulate file systems is like playing russian roulette. The least we can do is to warn users of the risk.

The main reason I've been using parted is the convenience of a utility that can change the file system and partition. Now I'm left with fdisk.

created: 2009-04-15 12:56:53. Permalink