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Does the data in an ext4 filesystem refer to absolute positions on the disk, or is it all relative to the start of the specific partition?

I want to know this because I want to move an ext4 filesystem so that it starts earlier on the disk. My current ext4 partition starts somewhere in the middle of the disk and extends to the end, and the only way to grow this filesystem is to make it start earlier.

So, can I move the ext4 filesystem around with dd, and expect it to work at its new address?


Of course, I would also have to edit my partition table, but that is a separate concern :)

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  • I'm pretty sure it's partition-related, you'd first have to enlarge your partition... Using something like clonezilla would be easier and less prone to errors though.
    – Jan
    Sep 3, 2014 at 20:21
  • clonezilla seems to require full copies. I'm a bit stretched on space, so I'm contemplating doing something dangerous--moving the 70GB filesystem forwards by 40GB, overwriting parts of the original in the operation. Yes, yes, I know it's not smart :) Sep 3, 2014 at 20:37
  • Use GParted on a live environment to move it.
    – muru
    Sep 4, 2014 at 7:55
  • GParted refuses to operate on my ext4 partition because the filesystem has enabled features that are unsupported by GParted. Further, GParted warns me not to use its filesystem support, so I'd prefer not to go that route :) Sep 4, 2014 at 8:01
  • (I ended up chickening out, removing files until I could copy the contents from my old partition into a new 40GB partition. I then removed the partitions from the partition table and created a new one to span all the 40+70 GBs, and resized the filesystem with resize2fs. Nevertheless, I would like to know whether or not it could have worked with moving the filesystem with dd) Sep 6, 2014 at 14:19

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