CentOS/RHEL Shrink Partitions

Increasing LVM partition sizes in CentOS/RHEL 5.X is infinitely easier than shrinking them, but in the rare instance where you might have to, here's a quick guide on a couple of gotchas. If you need to shrink the / partition (probably the rarest occurrence), you're stuck booting off a LiveCD and hoping for the best.

Now I bet you're saying something along the lines of "but all the other partitions should be easy, right?" Uh, no, particularly /usr. Why? Well, someone decided that the LVM utilities should reside under /usr. Not a big deal, they provide a static /sbin/lvm.static, which, while the syntax is slightly different, provides most (all?) of the functionality you are used to from the LVM utils.

Great, problem solved, right?! Nope, not quite. While /bin/bash (default root shell) doesn't depend on libraries under /usr, it does hold open files from the /usr tree. That prevents you from un-mounting /usr.

To shrink "system" partitions (except /, see above), you will likely need to be in single user mode, but before you do that, run chsh:

[root@centos5 ~]# chsh
Changing shell for root.
New shell [/bin/bash]: /bin/sh
Shell changed.
[root@centos5 ~]#

to change the login shell for the root user. After you are done, you can switch it back. Now reboot into single user mode.

Once in single user mode, you'll notice the prompt has now changed to:

sh-3.2#

or similar. Even though /bin/sh is just a symlink to /bin/bash, bash detects that it's being run as sh, runs with a reduced feature set, which doesn't require it to open files on /usr.

To shrink the /usr partition:

• umount /usr 
• e2fsck -f /dev/path/to/lvm/partition 
• resize2fs /dev/path/to/lvm/partition  [new size slightly smaller than desired final result]
• lvm.static lvmreduce -L [new size] /dev/path/to/lvm/partition
• resize2fs /dev/path/to/lvm/partition
• e2fsck -f /dev/path/to/lvm/partition
• mount /usr  

Wash, rinse, repeat for other partitions.

Enjoy. -R

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