On Vi, 01 oct 21, 09:23:52, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> On Jo, 30 sep 21, 21:51:20, Reco wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Sep 30, 2021 at 04:26:18PM +0100, Myron wrote:
> >
> > > Does it mean that if I remove the partition and then re-create the
> > > partition from the same starting block as the old partition, that the data
> > > on the MicroSD card will not actually be erased, but will be encapsulated
> > > by the new smaller partition?
> >
> > Haha. You won't be able to do that, Red Hat took care of it back in 3.2
> > kernel days. You cannot cannot change a partition layout on a block
> > device which has any filesystem mounted (or swap is used), the kernel
> > won't permit you to do that. Red Hat deserved and deserves whatever
> > things IBM is doing to them now, let's leave it at this.
> > Moreover, even if was possible, you'd need to shrink the filesystem
> > first, or you will damage it. And shrinking a mounted ext4 is impossible.
>
> [citation needed]
Apologies, I should have checked it before challenging that. From
resize2fs(8):
If the filesystem is mounted, it can be used to expand the size of
the mounted filesystem, assuming the kernel and the file system
supports on-line resizing.
so ext4 indeed doesn't support online shrinking.
According to Wikipedia it seems very few file systems do (notable
exceptions btrfs and (!) NTFS).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#Resize_capabilities
> > It's plain and downright impossible, unless you're using LVM. And even
> > then it's filesystem-specific, which excludes ext4 for instance. Sorry
> > to bring you the bad news.
> https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-resize-ext4-root-partition-live-without-umount
This however implies growing should be possible.
Kind regards,
Andrei
--
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