Reboot the RPi (yep its stupid but we’ve found a reboot to be needed even after removing and re-inserting the SD card), sudo startx, run gparted, select the USB drive and check the ext4 partition is locked again (mounted) and has its boot string back.Ultimate Boot CD is completely free for the download, or could be obtained for a small fee. Right click the main ‘ext4’ partition and select ‘check’ (we’ve found this to be necessary to ensure the new partition size is correctly updated in the file system even though it should be done as part of the resize – kept us chasing constantly failed resizes for hours before we discovered this).įinally click the green arrow button to carry out the changes. Right click the main ‘ext4’ partition and select ‘resize’ then enter the new size you want it to be. Right click the main ‘ext4’ partition and select ‘check’, then click the green tick and let it check the partition for you (this isn’t essential but its a good idea as if there are issues it will likely cause the resize to fail). Right click somewhere on the graphic and select ‘unmount’ first as operations can’t be carried out on a mounted partition. Then from the start menu select run and enter ‘gparted’ Resizing Your Main Partitionįrom the top bar devices drop down select “dev/sda” (or whatever your external USB adaptor has been called). To run it use ‘sudo startx’ to load the GUI as gparted needs root user privileges << root password gparted livecd

If you’d rather use a windows tool we’ve found that gparted just works whereas all of the windows based partition managers we tried don’t, so better to just get over the hassle factor and use the RPi to do this if you don’t have a separate Linux system. To do this you’ll need to put the SD card you want to work on in a USB to SD card adaptor and boot your RPi from a separate SD card.

It can also be used to check and repair a SD card disk.

‘gparted’ is the graphical version of ‘parted’ and is the tool to use to resize the main partition used for raspbian (or you could use use parted if you prefer the command line of course!).

Root password gparted livecd