Grow a Filesystem Onto Another Disk

Grow a Filesystem Onto Another Disk

Growing an existing filesystem onto an additional disk or disk partition is another way to increase the available space in that filesystem. The original disk partition and the new disk partition become either an lv logical volume or an XLV logical volume (your choice). The growfs command (EFS filesystems) or xfs_growfs command (XFS filesystems) preserves the existing data on the hard disk and adds space from the new disk partition to the filesystem. This process is simpler than completely remaking your filesystems. The one drawback to growing a filesystem across disks is that if one disk fails, you may not recover data from the other disk, even if the other disk still works. If your Usr filesystem is a logical volume, you will be unable to boot the system into multiuser mode. For this reason, it is preferable, if possible, to mount an additional disk and filesystem as a directory on the Root or Usr or filesystems (on / or /usr).

For instructions on growing a filesystem onto an additional disk, see the section "Growing an EFS Filesystem Onto Another Disk" or "Growing an XFS Filesystem Onto Another Disk" in Chapter 4.