Friday, November 7, 2014

Enlarging a live mdadm ext4 filesystem

My computer runs a several RAID5 arrays on a handful of drives of various sizes.  I recently replaced one of those drives with one of a larger size, which allowed me to add more space to one of my smaller RAID5 arrays.  I tried to enlarge the RAID filesystem without rebooting, which should theoretically been possible, but I couldn't make it work.  I eventually broke down and rebooted so I could finish the process.  Here's the blow by blow steps.