Very specific question about Partitions

Hello, I installed a premade image on an external hard drive and had no problems with it, the thing is, the image was 512gb and the drive is 1tb, so the software just left 500gb of unavailable space that I can’t use. Does anyone know how I can extend my hard drive partition so that it takes advantage of that space that balena etcher created?

image

Hi,

based on the partition layout I assume this is not balenaOS but something else, is that correct? Nevertheless, the resize happens in two steps:

  1. Resize the partition - the very application on the picture you shared should do the trick, right-clicking the 476.46GB partition you should see an option to resize it.
  2. Resize the underlying filesystem - after the partiton has been resized, boot the OS from the external drive. It should boot up correctly but still report ~500GB. The actual command you need to run depends on your setup. You need to know two things - the device name and the filesystem type, each filesystem has their own utility for manipulating the filesystem. If you are not sure, you can try opening a terminal window and run resize2fs /dev/sda2. To explain what this does: resize2fs is the utility for resizing EXT filesystems. /dev/sda2 refers to the 2nd partition on the sda disk, this is what a USB drive is likely to be labelled if no other storage media are connected.

Is this something you can try?