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On a dual boot system (Vista/Jaunty) I wanted to take some unallocated space and enlarge my ext3 partition. Upon doing so I noticed that the disk check that runs from parted kept failing at the end of the resize, and also that my actual space used within that partition had growm.

i.e. from 14g used of 20g partition to 36g used of 40g partition (approximate guesses)

Any attempt at running check again just made the used space grow more... surely this can't just be logs can it? Eventually I was maxed out on used space and opted to do a fresh install.

Initially I just used the gparted GUI from a liveUSB, and as that kept giving me a cryptic error (after the resize, before final check) I tried some command line wizardry with e2fsck and then tried to use resize2fs (albeit I didn't know enough about using this but this was by no means a vital system, so I played).

Is this normal behaviour?

I don't necessarily think there was a problem beyond human error here, I'm not very experienced when it comes to managing filesystems and partitions and the like.

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  • would this question be better suited as a SuperUser question? it's not really Server related technically, but I'm not sure...
    – codeLes
    Jul 20, 2009 at 15:33

2 Answers 2

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"Is this normal behaviour?" Definitely no. Resizing the partition shouldn't swallow up gigabytes of space like that.

Probably isn't human error either. Sounds like the filesystem structures have been corrupted in some way. Could you give us more detail on the command you used?

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  • initially I just used the gparted GUI from a liveUSB, and as that kept giving me a cryptic error (after the resize, before final check) I tried some terminal wizardry with e2fsck and then tried to use resize2fs (albeit I didn't know enough about using this but this was by no means a vital system, so I played). will add this to the question...
    – codeLes
    Jul 8, 2009 at 13:46
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No, this is not normal. Resizing shouldn't use any additional space. My suggestion is to backup critical data, wipe the partition, and reinstall from scratch with a fresh non-resized partition.

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