On Thu, Sep 30, 2021 at 11:52:20PM -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote: > On Sep 30, 2021, at 23:43, Alok Jain <jain.alok103@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > I have a problem while extending the ext4 filesystem on my block > > device which was 12Tb now extended to 32tb. I uses growpart then > > e2fsck followed by resize which failed, Any idea how to address > > this? > > > > [root@prod-dev1 ~]# resize2fs /dev/sdj1 > > > > resize2fs 1.42.9 (28-Dec-2013) > > > > resize2fs: New size too large to be expressed in 32 bits > > > > Firstly, you should run with a newer version of e2fsprogs. That version > is 8 years old and is missing a lot of bug fixes. > > Secondly, I don't think it is possibly to resize over 16TiB for a filesystem that > started life smaller than 16TiB due to missing the "64-bit" feature, among > others. More modern versions of resize2fs do have the -b option, which will reorganize the file system to support the 64-bit feature. HOWEVER, this feature is not used very often, and may have bugs, and many companies who support Enterprise Linux Distributions do not support changing file system features using resize2fs or tune2fs on existing file systems, simply because the quality control efforts they would need to do before they would be willing to stand behind that feature is more than they think it is worth. In addition, you will tend to get much better performance if you create a freshly formatted file system with the modern features that are needed, and then copy the data over. Finally, in addtion to e2fsprogs 1.42.9 being Very, Very Old, if you are using such a prehistoric version of e2fsprogs, it's likely that the Linux kernel, and other portions of your Linux userspace, are antedeluvian as well. That means not only are you missing bug fixes, you are likely missing many security bug fixes as well. So I'd strongly suggest that you upgrade your entire Linux distribution to something more modern, and not just e2fsprogs. In particular, there have been many resize2fs bugs that were fixed since 1.42.9, and so I would not recommend any resize operation until you've upgraded your software (especially off-line resizes such as that which would be required to use resize2fs -b). > Given that you have 20TB of free space, you should copy your 12TB > of data to a newly-formatted 20TB filesystem, and then resize that once > the original one is no longer needed. Not only does that avoid the resize > issue, but also gives you a backup of the original data for a while. And if you think it's too expensive to have the swing space necessary to do the backup, I'd gently ask you to consider how much your 12TB of data is worth to you.... and how much your time might be worth if you have to reconstruct it if it were to get lost. Which is why regular backups is always a good idea. - Ted
