Centos: Change partition size on the fly?

The safest way to do this is to shutdown your linode, then edit the disks via the linode manager. You won't have to reformat.

I didn't know it was safe to do it through the Dashboard. So it will only change the size of the partitions and I will not lose any data?

@TungstenX:

So it will only change the size of the partitions and I will not lose any data?
True as long as you have an ext2/3 filesystem on the disk image. If you try to shrink the image too much (smaller than the underlying filesystem), the resize will fail gracefully.

If you created raw disk images and used OS tools inside your Linode to create something non-standard, control panel resizing won't work as expected and may well eat your filesystem/partition(s).

Make a backup.

@pclissold:

If you created raw disk images and used OS tools inside your Linode to create something non-standard, control panel resizing won't work as expected and may well eat your filesystem/partition(s).

Even in that case, the mandatory pre-resize fsck will immediately bomb out with apocalyptic errors when it can't find anything resembling an ext3 filesystem and the resize will fail gracefully. Probably. Most of the time.

> Make a backup.

Always.

Whoot whoot! It worked. The back-uping took the whole day :( but the changing of the partition sizes took less than 5 min.

Thank you to all that helped me!