Upgrade OpenWrt with bigger disks

The process of upgrading OpenWrt can be troublesome. You would like to keep your settings - of course - but what if you need a bigger disk size. This mostly applies for x86 devices, SoC like the Raspberry Pi or virtualized systems. As the downloadable image is really small, a bigger system disk might come in very handy.

This video is a tutorial on how to start with 21.02.01 and end up with 21.02.2 plus having more space to store additional packages or files. It will also work for other versions of OpenWrt.

This tutorial does NOT apply to upgrading Router / Access Points that have onboard flash of a static size but to systems that have upgradable storage.

0:00 Introduction
1:10 Prepare upgrade
1:38 Download image
1:52 Resize image
4:54 Upgrade process

[JohnPMiller]

I used Attended SysUpgrade to upgrade my Raspberry Pi from 21.02.3 to 22.03.3 while keeping packages and configurations. It seems to work (I haven't thoroughly checked yet), but it did shrink my EXT4 partition to a tiny one. I ended up popping my microSD card into a linux box and using fdisk, e2fsck and resize2fs to recover my 32GB of disk space, but I think gparted is the way to go. Thanks for the video!

[Mikesco]

Really like your channel, however, please move your picture to the top right corner of the screen, because it would cover the least amount of input as you type the commands