[SOLVED] `growpart` failed on Debian

Issue

I am running Debian 8.7 on Google Cloud. The instance had a disk of size 50G, and I increased its size to 100G, as shown in the lsblk output below:

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0  100G  0 disk
`-sda1   8:1    0   50G  0 part /

I then tried to increase the size of sda1 using

sudo growpart /dev/sda 1

, but got the following error:

failed [sfd_list:1] sfdisk --list --unit=S /dev/sda
FAILED: failed: sfdisk --list /dev/sda

It didn't tell me the specific reason for the failure. I googled around and couldn't find anyone who got this issue.

I followed the gcloud documentation and cannot figure out where the problem is.

Solution

Google Cloud images for Debian, Ubuntu, etc. have the ability to automatically resize the root file system on startup. If you resize the disk while the system is running, the next time the system is rebooted the partition and file system will be resized.

You can also resize the root file system while the system is running without rebooting.

Replace INSTANCE_NAME and ZONE in the following commands. The second command assumes that the file system is EXT4. Check for your system setup.

Resize the disk:

gcloud compute disks resize INSTANCE_NAME --zone ZONE --size 30GB --quiet

Resize the partition and file system:

gcloud compute ssh INSTANCE_NAME --zone ZONE --command "sudo expand-root.sh /dev/sda 1 ext4"

Debian 9 – Resize Root File System

Answered By - John Hanley