Re: How to create an image file system that grows

[Juha Tuuna <juha.tuuna@iki.fi>]

T o n g wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> How can I create an image file system that can grow bigger as required?
> 
> Vmware, qemu, kvm, etc all can create file systems in an image file which 
> is initially small, but grow bigger as required. I want to do that too, 
> but 
> 
>  dd if=/dev/zero of=file-fs.ext2 bs=1k count=20k
>  mke2fs file-fs.ext2 
> 
> would only create an image file initially as big as the full size.
> 
> please help, thanks
> 

With this you cannot automagically grow the filesystem every time it runs out
of space but hope this helps even a bit:

1. Backup and umount the container file

2. Add enough space to the container file (in this example 8 MiB)

dd if=/dev/zero of=file-fs.ext2 bs=8M count=1 conv=notrunc oflag=append

3. Check the filesystem

e2fsck -f file-fs.ext2

4. Resize filesystem

resize2fs file-fs.ext2

5. Enjoy our extra megabytes.

-- 
Juha Tuuna