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Manually Expanding Disk Partitions & Filesystems (Linux)

Normally, Tilaa's automation (cloud-init) automatically resizes your partitions when you upgrade your VPS storage. However, on older servers or custom installations, you might need to perform this step manually.

Backup First:
Manipulating partition tables carries a risk of data loss. Please create a Snapshot before proceeding.

Step 1: Diagnose the issue

Check if your Operating System sees the new space, but isn't using it yet.

lsblk

Example Output:

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
vda    253:0    0   20G  0 disk
└─vda1 253:1    0   10G  0 part /

In this example, the physical disk (vda) is 20G, but the partition (vda1) is only 10G. We need to grow the partition to fill the disk.

Step 2: Install growpart

To resize the partition safely, we use the growpart utility.

Ubuntu / Debian

apt update && apt install cloud-guest-utils -y

AlmaLinux / Rocky / CentOS

dnf install cloud-utils-growpart -y

Step 3: Extend the Partition

Run the following command to extend partition 1 on disk vda:

# Syntax: growpart  
growpart /dev/vda 1

If successful, it will say "CHANGED: partition=1...".

Step 4: Resize the Filesystem

Now the partition is larger, but the filesystem inside it doesn't know that yet. The command depends on your filesystem type (ext4 vs xfs).

Check your filesystem type:

df -T /

Option A: If Type is ext4 (Debian/Ubuntu default)

resize2fs /dev/vda1

Option B: If Type is xfs (CentOS/RHEL default)

xfs_growfs /

Step 5: Verify

Check the disk space again. The size of the partition and the mount point should now match the disk size.

df -h /