Growing a LUKS partition into preceding free disk space?
Message
Growing a LUKS partition into preceding free disk space?
I created a swap partition, but later decided to use btrfs swap features instead, and deleted my swap partition. I want to merge the free space into an existing LUKS partition, only the free space is before the root partition, not after, so I don't know what to do.
- NeddySeagoon
- Administrator
- Posts: 56087
- Joined: Sat Jul 05, 2003 9:37 am
- Location: 56N 3W
leyvi,
A word of advice. Don't.
If you really made a LUKS volume on the partition, you need to back up your data , verify the backup. Make and veryify another copy.
Now you can destroy the partiton and its content, fix it and restore your data.
There are tools that claim to move partition content forward but if they hit problems or get interupted your filesystem is gone, so you need the backup anyway.
If you put LUKS inside a LVM volume group, LVM can add the space before the partition start to the Volume Group.
Have you thought about using what was the swap partition for another filesystem?
A word of advice. Don't.
If you really made a LUKS volume on the partition, you need to back up your data , verify the backup. Make and veryify another copy.
Now you can destroy the partiton and its content, fix it and restore your data.
There are tools that claim to move partition content forward but if they hit problems or get interupted your filesystem is gone, so you need the backup anyway.
If you put LUKS inside a LVM volume group, LVM can add the space before the partition start to the Volume Group.
Have you thought about using what was the swap partition for another filesystem?
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
This is a follow-on to Resize a LUKS partition?. OP decided to repost the question when [post]8871003[/post] was not answered quickly.
Would I use dd for this? Or some specialized tool for backing up a LUKS partition? Or should I use btrfs snapshotting to make a backup of the filesystem, move it to an external drive, rework the partitions, copy the filesystem back, and GNU shred the external drive? What do you reccomend?NeddySeagoon wrote:If you really made a LUKS volume on the partition, you need to back up your data , verify the backup. Make and veryify another copy.
Now you can destroy the partiton and its content, fix it and restore your data.
- NeddySeagoon
- Administrator
- Posts: 56087
- Joined: Sat Jul 05, 2003 9:37 am
- Location: 56N 3W
leyvi,
Back up the files on the filesystem after it has been unlocked.
I don't know if LUKS uses any absolute sector addresses. If so, dd cannot work as they would need to be updated to be correct in their new home.
Back up the files on the filesystem after it has been unlocked.
I don't know if LUKS uses any absolute sector addresses. If so, dd cannot work as they would need to be updated to be correct in their new home.
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
I dug a bit deeper, and found this. It worked perfectly first try. If you're reading this thread for informative purposes, I recommend making heavy use of sfdisk's --list and --list-free options as well, and triple-checking the values you pass to sfdisk before you run it. Also, I did back up my data beforehand (I just tarballed the etc directory and scp'd it onto my phone, since that's all I really cared about).