Daniel Hiller

20+ years in software engineering.
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Resize encrypted file systems for lvm

2020-02-13

linux fedora filesystem lvm encryption 

POSSIBLY OUTDATED

There seems to be an easier way now as lvresize has a parameter --resizefs that can do everything in one go now. See this gist

How to reduce Fedora home partition and increase root in an encrypted luks container

CAVEAT: I am not responsible for you losing your data trying this! Please backup your data before doing this! If anything goes wrong, data will be lost!!!

I’ve been in the situation where either root or home partition have been low on free disk space, while the other partition had lots of free space available. Therefore the idea is to first shrink the space on the partition where space is available and then give that space to the other partition. With that said, I’ve done this a couple of times already and the filesystems were healthy afterwards.

Initial situation:

What you need:

Note: In the bash commands that follow I resize the home partition to 40GB, you should adjust the disk space to something reasonable that fits your need.

How to resize partitions:

  1. Boot Fedora Live CD/USB
  2. open LUKS container
    • open application Disks
    • Select luks partition
    • Select lock symbol
    • Enter password for partition
    • now partitions inside container should be visible in GUI
  3. Open terminal window - get root
    • sudo su -
  4. Important: after each of the following steps you should run e2fsck and correct any errors you get
    • either e2fsck -f /dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-home
    • or e2fsck -f /dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-root
  5. shrink home by first resizing the filesystem and then resizing the partition
    • resize2fs /dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-home 40G
    • lvreduce -L 40G /dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-home
  6. resize the root partition to take the free space
    • lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-root
    • resize2fs /dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-root

See also:

Related posts:

Set up multiple JDKs with jenv and AdoptOpenJDK
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