I have a server dedicated to the purpose of hosting an ownCloud instance. OwnCloud 8 to be exact. It’s an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS virtual machine, on an ESXi 5 hypervisor. This is my own server, and not any sort of revenue generating customer service. It has become a “Dropbox” replacement for myself, and a few select friends and family. Recently, I found the original 1TB I allocated to be filling up quickly. So, I started doing some google searches to see how I could go about resizing, or expanding, an LVM group (like a partition). I found an enormous wealth of information, much of it conflicting. As I started going through a guide, that closely matched my configuration (everything was the same, actually, except the size of the disk), I instantly faced problems with commands not working. It was frustrating. Eventually I navigated through it and successfully expanded the Logical Volume. I figured I would go ahead and document my troubles so that I can make others lives a little easier.
Firstly, you need to run a couple commands to see what you’re working with. These commands are df and fdisk -l. You should see something like this:
[email protected]:~$ df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/cloud--vg-root 1048254140 65112056 929870740 7% / none 4 0 4 0% /sys/fs/cgroup udev 4077252 4 4077248 1% /dev tmpfs 817700 524 817176 1% /run none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock none 4088496 0 4088496 0% /run/shm none 102400 0 102400 0% /run/user /dev/sda1 240972 67164 161367 30% /boot [email protected]:~$ sudo fdisk -l [sudo] password for mike: Disk /dev/sda: 1099.5 GB, 1099511627776 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 133674 cylinders, total 2147483648 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000c9595 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 499711 248832 83 Linux /dev/sda2 501758 2147481599 1073489921 5 Extended /dev/sda5 501760 2147481599 1073489920 8e Linux LVM Disk /dev/mapper/cloud--vg-root: 1090.7 GB, 1090661646336 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 132598 cylinders, total 2130198528 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/mapper/cloud--vg-root doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/mapper/cloud--vg-swap_1: 8589 MB, 8589934592 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1044 cylinders, total 16777216 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000