How to Resize Linux Disk

John on November 03, 2021

In this tutorial, we will learn how to resize a Linux disk on a virtual server so it reflects the increase in size.

Once you have increased (or decreased) the size of the mounted disk on the hosting control panel for your virtual Linux machine, you'll notice that when running the df command the system isn't aware that the size of the disk has increased.

df -h

Filesystem   Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs      1.5G 1.1M 1.5G  1% /run
/dev/sda1    97G  52G  45G 54% /
tmpfs      7.2G   0 7.2G  0% /dev/shm
tmpfs      5.0M   0 5.0M  0% /run/lock
tmpfs      4.0M   0 4.0M  0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sdc     15G  13G 992M 94% /mnt/vol2
/dev/sda15   105M 5.2M 100M  5% /boot/efi
/dev/sdb    679G 627G  18G 98% /mnt/vol1
tmpfs      1.5G 4.0K 1.5G  1% /run/user/1001

In my case, I increased the size of /dev/sdb to 700GB but the changes were not applied to the system.

To update the disk size on the system, run the resize2fs command and pass the path of the disk as the first argument.

sudo resize2fs /dev/sdb

resize2fs 1.45.7 (28-Jan-2021)
The filesystem is now 188743680 (4k) blocks long.