Extend USB drive partition

[WebX]

OK, so I just upgraded from a 1TB to a 4TB hard drive on my AC68U.

After files simply refused to transfer from one network drive to the other, I just pulled up EaseUS Backup and cloned the 1TB drive to the 4TB drive.

OK, so that worked well enough. But now I need to extend the partition, but it is EXT3 so it isn't making it easy.

I've tried EaseUS stuff, Partition Genius, and tried getting paragon (but it ended up being just garbage shareware).

So I'm SSHing into the thing and can't even do stuff like fdisk -p.

Partition managers generally show that the partition is expanded. Basically what I need to do is regenerate some header....mapping.....partition record.....file. They say this is easily done by simply resizing the drive down a bit and then size it back up.

But again, I don't know how to resize a partition in Merlin. I feel like this should be a very basic function.

Anyone have a solution?

Also note, the only Linux system anywhere in my apartment is the ASUS router. I have a raspberry pi but it is Hass.IO based on Resin.IO, so not exactly a normal distro.

 

[bbunge]

Gparted live. Run from CD or USB stick.
https://gparted.org/livecd.php

Sent from my P01M using Tapatalk

 

[ColinTaylor]

Expanding a filesystem is a two step process. First you change the partition size using something like fdisk. Then you need to resize the filesystem to use the extra space. The commands to do this are fdisk and resize2fs.

The router doesn't have resize2fs because it's an embedded device not a Linux distribution. Try @bbunge's suggestion.

 

[WebX]

New
OK, so I changed it up a bit. Wiped the 4TB drive to start over. This time I figured I would just format it to EXT3. Of course, ASUSWRT doesn't seem to be able to format anything. "Can't allocate memory". And even then, EXT isn't an option.

So I connected it to my PC and created a partition and formatted it to EXT3.

Connected it to the router, and it sees the drive, but I can't create any folders in the Samba GUI. SSH it is.

So I get in there and do mkdir Media and now it's giving me "cannot create folder. read-only file system". I can easily create folders on the old drive.

The one difference I can think of is that the new partition is GPT while the old drive's partition is MBR.

 

[bbunge]

So, go back to MBR. With Gparted you can do that easily.
Also, my experience shows EXT4 on Asus will work but the built in file scanner does not do EXT4. EXT3 yes.

Sent from my P01M using Tapatalk

 

[sfx2000]

Expanding a filesystem is a two step process. First you change the partition size using something like fdisk. Then you need to resize the filesystem to use the extra space. The commands to do this are fdisk and resize2fs.

The router doesn't have resize2fs because it's an embedded device not a Linux distribution. Try @bbunge's suggestion.

Just a thought...

One - resizing a filesystem is always risky if there is data already in place, so one must ensure that data is backed up somewhere...

Two - in my personal experience - many pre-formatted drives are really focused on Windows (and maybe Mac) - it's best to nuke all the partitions on the drive, and start over...

Three - Raspbian and a Pi is really handy if you do not have ready access to a linux machine - there you have access to a number of tools - gparted, parted, fdisk, etc...

 

[WebX]

One: Good thing I have the original drive handy.
Two: First thing I did was remove the drive to disable IntelliPark. Nuked it from there.
Three: Yeah, I have a Pi 3, but it's being used for Hass.IO.

But to conclude, I ended up formatting the drive to NTFS, getting an EXT3 reader program, transferring the data to the new drive, wiping the old drive and formatting it to NTFS, moving some data back (organizing data between the two), and then just using my main windows desktop as my server.

Saw a jump from 12MB/s bursts with 6MB/s averages to seeing 20-100MB/s consistent. Not the most power-efficient method, but I do plan on making that PC a server on my next upgrade anyway (probably FreeNAS or Ubuntu. Maybe still windows?), so I figured I would give it a try. Probably underclock it, get a smaller, more efficient PSU, and set it up with a UPS when I do the full upgrade. Oh, and it will be at least RAID-1. Probably RAID-5 later on.

Thanks for the help anyway! I really do appreciate it.