Ubuntu – How to create an EXT4 partition with an extra large number of inodes

It is a little bit time consuming, but it can be done if:

Assuming /dev/sdb1, and that the unallocated space is bigger than the amount of data from /dev/sdb1:

Before we start, let's create some mounting point directories in /mnt/:

mkdir /mnt/old && mkdir /mnt/new

The disk now looks like this:

[(.......UNALLOCATED.........)(xxxx /dev/sdb1 xxxxxx)]

• e2fsck -f -y -v /dev/sdb1 #just to be sure that it is error free.
• fdisk /dev/sdb
• Press: n p 2 wq
• mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb2
  Now the disk looks like this:

[(xxxxxx /dev/sdb2 xxxxxxxxxx)(xxxx /dev/sdb1 xxxxxx)]

• mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/new && mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/old
• mv /mnt/old/* /mnt/new/ (You will get an error about lost+found, you can ignore it)
• cd / && umount /mnt/old && umount /mnt/new
• cfdisk /dev/sdb
• Delete sdb1
• Choose write
• Delete sdb2
• Choose write
• Create new, choose the whole size available.
• Write and quit.
• e2fsck -f /dev/sdb1
• resize2fs /dev/sdb1 Now the disk looks like this:

[(xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx /dev/sdb1 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)]

• mount /dev/sdb1 /your/mount/point

FINISHED!

So you increased the size of sda2? A filesystem can live in a partition bigger than its size, but if you want take advantage of this additional size, you have to resize your filesystem. Gparted should have done this for you automatically. Usually this isn't a risky process... Did the Gparted operation went through without errors?

The mentioned block 6881289 is inside your partition size (at 26.25GiB) so this block should be just fine...

I would suggest to check your partition table again, did you move your sda2 partition? Is the partition than before? Try using fdisk and the command (p)print.

Then you should do a full fsck on that drive (run on the unmounted filesystem from a LiveCD). Scan for bad blocks using the -c option (-f for force, means even the fs is marked as clean and -v for verbose). If more errors appear, there is probably a hardware failure.

fsck -cvf /dev/sda2