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We are using Amazon c1.medium instances which come with 350GB of ephemeral storage that is mounted as /dev/xvda2 on our Debian images. We need this to be partitioned into two parts, one of which is 80 GB and the other with the remaining space. How can I partition that space on a running instance?

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  • What region and AMI id are you starting with?
    – Eric Hammond
    Oct 18, 2012 at 17:37
  • @EricHammond - us-east but we are using a custom AMI that we built ourselves.
    – anonymous
    Oct 18, 2012 at 18:53
  • Did you start with a public AMI or did you build it from scratch?
    – Eric Hammond
    Oct 18, 2012 at 19:22
  • @EricHammond - It was built from scratch but my understanding is that we should be able to manipulate the /dev/xvda2/ drive irrespective of the AMI itself.
    – anonymous
    Oct 18, 2012 at 19:59
  • Sure, I'm just trying to get a better understanding of what you're starting with so that the commands match your environment. Each AMI can be built with different attach points, mount points, installed software, etc.
    – Eric Hammond
    Oct 18, 2012 at 20:12

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In this instance, lvm is the best way to approach the problem and there are a lot of good tutorials out there that go into the workings of lvm.

From the standpoint of this problem, once you have lvm figured out, things are fairly straightforward:

# Create the partitions that are needed for scratch space
pvcreate /dev/xvda2
vgcreate /dev/vg_xvda2 /dev/xvda2
lvcreate -L 80G -n scratch /dev/vg_xvda2
lvcreate -l 100%FREE -n large_scratch /dev/vg_xvda2

# Format the scratch space 
mkfs.ext3 /dev/vg_xvda2/scratch
mkfs.ext3 /dev/vg_xvda2/large_scratch

For reasons of convenience you may want to add a link to the partitions that were created so that they look like a drive, in which case:

# Create a link to the scratch space allocated 
ln -s /dev/vg_xvda2/scratch /dev/scratch
ln -s /dev/vg_xvda2/large_scratch /dev/large_scratch
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