Step‑by‑Step Guide to Expanding a Mounted Linux Disk with XFS
This article explains how to identify a full disk, prepare the environment, partition and format a new disk, update fstab, copy data, and verify the expansion using Linux commands such as fdisk, mkfs.xfs, mount, and du.
When a mounted disk (e.g., /dev/sdb mounted at /apps) reaches high usage (over 85%), you can expand storage by adding a new disk (e.g., /dev/sdc).
Initial disk list (output of lsblk) shows existing disks sda, sdb, and sdc.
Environment preparation :
Create the mount point: mkdir /apps Partition the existing disk: fdisk /dev/sdb Format the new partition with XFS: mkfs.xfs /dev/sdb1 Verify the filesystem: blkid /dev/sdb1 Edit /etc/fstab to add an entry for automatic mounting.
Disk expansion :
Create a new mount point: mkdir /data Partition the added disk: fdisk /dev/sdc Format the new partition: mkfs.xfs /dev/sdc1 Verify the new filesystem: blkid /dev/sdc1 Edit /etc/fstab to mount /dev/sdc1 at /data on boot.
Copy existing data: cp -a /apps/. /data/ Compare sizes to confirm successful copy: du -sh /apps and du -sh /data Unmount the original mount point: umount /apps After these steps, the new disk provides additional space (e.g., 30 GB with only 1 % used) and the system continues to operate with the expanded storage.
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