My experience is that when you get the "block N not
reserved" message it
is because you are attempting to increase the size of the filesystem
beyond what can be done online.
I doubt that, because I am trying to resize the root fs by 3-4G,
and earlier I resized my home fs by 10G without a problem.
An EXT[2|3] filesystem, when created, has a hard limit on the size to
which it can grow while mounted - to grow beyond this size requires the
file system to be unmounted so that additional data structures can be
created within it. I believe the rule of thumb is that you can double
the size of the file system from what it was originally while it is
mounted, but you cannot go beyond that without unmounting it and
extending it.
In which case my resize should have worked... it's a minor increase,
about 25% of the current size.
XFS does not have this restriction, and IIRC neither does ReiserFS.
So, the upshot is that the file system will have to be unmounted and
extended. If this is the rootfs then this will have to be done from a
rescue disk or from the initrd (what I have done is to create an initrd
that extends the partition to the maximum size of the partition it is
in, and then I can simply invoke that initrd when needed.)
I can try the rescue disk, but the "block reserved" message is not
helpful at all when trying to determine the cause of the problem.
--
Ivan Gyurdiev <ivg2(a)cornell.edu>
Cornell University