Growpart not working to expand a volume

Question

I have an m4-large instance with an attached volume configured for 10GB but which originally was created for 4GB.  
I am trying to expand the space, but get the following error:  
**sudo growpart /dev/xvdf 1**  
WARN: unknown label  
failed \[sfd_dump:1] sfdisk --unit=S --dump /dev/xvdf  
/dev/xvdf: device contains a valid 'ext4' signature; it is strongly recommended to wipe the device with wipefs(8) if this is unexpected, in order to avoid possible collisions  
sfdisk: failed to dump partition table: Success  
FAILED: failed to dump sfdisk info for /dev/xvdf  
==================================  
df -h  
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on  
udev            3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev  
tmpfs           799M  9.0M  790M   2% /run  
/dev/xvda1       20G   18G  2.0G  91% /  
tmpfs           3.9G   96K  3.9G   1% /dev/shm  
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock  
tmpfs           3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup  
**/dev/xvdf       3.9G  8.0M  3.6G   1% /alfresco**  
tmpfs           799M   20K  799M   1% /run/user/112  
tmpfs           799M     0  799M   0% /run/user/1000  
===================================  
lsblk  
NAME    MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT  
xvda    202:0    0  20G  0 disk  
ââxvda1 202:1    0  20G  0 part /  
**xvdf    202:80   0  10G  0 disk /alfresco**

maryjane_s · Answer

OK.  
I instead used the command:  
sudo resize2fs /dev/xvdf1  
  
And that worked.  I don't know why growpart did not work, but I am past that now.

ankou · Answer

I'm not an expert but in my experience, I would say that;  
growpart works w/ a volume that has partitions as you must put a partition number.  
On the other hand, resize2fs works w/ all the types of volumes.  
Note that if you are expanding the size of a root volume you would need to use both of the commands after you modify the instance size on form EBS volumes screen.  
  
Steps are:  
> Modify the volume size from AWS management console.  
> Connect to your instance via SSH.  
> Expand the size on the volume partition eg.

```
sudo growpart /dev/xvda 1
```

> Resize the volume partition
 `sudo resize2fs /dev/xvda1`

Growpart not working to expand a volume

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