Growing an existing ESP?

[HughR]

The default size of a new ESP has been changed to at least 500M.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BiggerESP
https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/4711

It would be good to make it easier to expand an existing ESP without losing the content. This is needed when installing Fedora while retaining an existing OS (e.g. Windows). It is also needed when upgrading an older Fedora release.

It so happens that I've been struggling with expanding ESPs on some recently acquired computers with pre-installed Windows and with 100M ESPs.

At the moment, it is particularly hard to do so with gparted/parted because libparted-fs-resize cannot handle some kinds of FAT filesystems. It fails with the rather opaque message

No Implementation: GNU Parted cannot resize this partition to this size. We're working on it!

The message is actually wrong. The partition has been resized but the filesystem hasn't been. It is also wrong because, as far as I can tell, nobody has worked on it in a decade. At least no data is lost.

A few changes that might help Fedora

• (at a minimum) make the message clearer and more accurate.
• (better) upgrade libparted-fs-resize to handle the types of FAT that are used in ESPs
• include gparted in the distribution media (I think that this is a good idea anyway)
• (better) have a specialized tool in the installer to create a new, larger ESP and delete the existing one

I've tried to document the hacky and complex procedure that I used yesterday https://gtalug.org/pipermail/talk/2023-November/012702.html