parted

I’m trying to create an XFS filestem on a used disk, and got into a problem. Here is the error message: # mkfs.xfs /dev/sda1 mkfs.xfs: cannot open /dev/sda1: Device or resource busy So, let’s see if I can fix it. (Spoiler alert: I think I can, even though it’s not yet done at the time of this writing.) Let’s check the partitions of /dev/sda: # parted /dev/sda print Model: ATA ST1000LM014-1EJ1 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: gpt Disk Flags: Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 1049kB 512GB 512GB ntfs 1 So, there is a partition (/dev/sda1) with 512GB in size, and its filesystem is ntfs....

I’m quite sure I’d resized qcow2 images before. However, when I needed to resize an image today for my VM at home, I totally forgot about it. Well, this means it’s a good excuse for me to just write down a few commands to help me in the future. If you try to follow a long, two things you wanna keep in in mind: do it at your own risk, and always backup your data before you make change to it....

One of my virtual machines runs out of disk space in the root (/) partition, and I want to remove the /home partition and using this free space to resize the root partition. Nowadays, for any serious systems, I’d use LVM with XFS on top. However, for this test VM, I have a virtual disk with 4 partitions without LVM. Managing partition on LVM is much easier than working the disk partition directly....

My favourite tool to create disk partitions on Linux is c[fg]disk. cfdisk used to create MBR based partition, and cgdisk is for GPT one. Today, I want to learn to use another tool called GNU Parted. After plugging an external disk, we can use udiskctl command to identify the disk device. # udisksctl status MODEL REVISION SERIAL DEVICE -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB EMT01B6Q S21MNXAG919308T sda ST2000DM001-1ER164 HP51 Z4Z46TMA sdb ST2000DM001-1ER164 HP51 Z4Z46W3E sdc Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB EMT01B6Q S21MNXAG919312Y sdd Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250G 0309 533144424E4541443837343335324120 sde The last Samsung SSD 840 (/dev/sde) is the one that I’m going to work with....