Increasing the size of an additional disk

Objective

If you have reached the maximum capacity on your additional disk, you can add more storage by increasing its size.

This guide explains how to increase the size of an additional disk and extend the main partition accordingly.

Requirements

• A Public Cloud instance in your Public Cloud project
• An additional disk created in your project
• Access to the OVHcloud Control Panel
• Administrative (sudo) access to your instance via SSH (Linux) or RDP (Windows)

Instructions

The following steps presume that you have configured an additional disk according to our guide.

Monitoring disk usage before resizing

To ensure that you resize your disk at the right moment, it is essential to monitor disk usage regularly. Below are quick tutorials for both Windows and Linux to help you track disk space and anticipate when an upgrade is needed.

wmic logicaldisk get name, size, freespace

Get-PSDrive | Where-Object {$_.Free -ne $null} | Select-Object Name, Used, Free

df -h

lsblk

Modifying the size of the disk

Log in to the OVHcloud Control Panel, go to the Public Cloud section and select the Public Cloud project concerned. Then click on Block Storage in the left-hand menu under Storage & backup

If the volume is attached to a Windows instance, click on ... in the row of the volume and select Detach from instance.

Click on ... in the row of the volume and select Edit.

In the popup window, enter the new size for the volume and click on Modify the volume.

Extending the partition (Linux instance)

Establish an SSH connection to your instance in order to adjust the partition to the resized disk.

Unmount the disk first by using this command:

admin@server:~$ sudo umount /mnt/disk

Recreate the partition:

admin@server:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/vdb

Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.25.2).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command

Command (m for help): d

Selected partition 1
Partition 1 has been deleted.

Command (m for help): n

Partition type
p primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)
e extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p):
Using default response p.
Partition number (1-4, default 1):
First sector (2048-146800639, default 2048):
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (2048-146800639, default 146800639):

Created a new partition 1 of type 'Linux' and of size 70 GiB.

Command (m for help): w

The partition table has been altered.
Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.

Verify and check the partition:

admin@server:~$ sudo e2fsck -f /dev/vdb1

e2fsck 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014)
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
/dev/vdb: 12/3276800 files (0.0% non-contiguous), 251700/13107200 blocks

admin@server:~$ sudo resize2fs /dev/vdb1

resize2fs 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014)
Resizing the filesystem on /dev/vdb to 18350080 (4k) blocks.
The filesystem on /dev/vdb is now 18350080 (4k) blocks long.

Finally, re-mount and check the disk:

admin@server:~$ sudo mount /dev/vdb1 /mnt/disk/

admin@server:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1 9.8G 840M 8.6G 9% /
udev 10M 0 10M 0% /dev
tmpfs 393M 5.2M 388M 2% /run
tmpfs 982M 0 982M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 982M 0 982M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/vdb1 69G 52M 66G 1% /mnt/disk

Once this is completed, detach the volume from the instance and reattach it to ensure the updated QoS settings (IOPS and bandwidth) are properly applied.

Extending the partition (Windows instance)

Before proceeding, reattach the volume to the instance. Click on ... in the row of the volume and select Attach to instance.

Establish a remote desktop (RDP) connection to your Windows instance.

Once logged in, right-click on the Start Menu button and open Disk Management.

The extended disk now displays the additional capacity as unallocated space.

Right-click on the volume and select Extend Volume from the context menu.

In the "Extend Volume Wizard", click on Next to proceed.

You can modify the disk space in this step if you want to add less than the entire amount to the partition. Click on Next.

Click on Finish to complete the process.

The resized volume now includes the additional disk space.

Once this is completed, detach the volume from the instance and reattach it to ensure the updated QoS settings (IOPS and bandwidth) are properly applied.

Go further

Creating and configuring an additional disk on an instance

Change your Block Storage volume type

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