[CentOS] Increasing existing partition and LVM size

Tue Feb 6 15:47:01 UTC 2007
Alfred von Campe <alfred at 110.net>

I have a disk on which CentOS is installed and running.  The disk  
partitions look like this:

Disk /dev/sda: 42.9 GB, 42949672960 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5221 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
/dev/sda2              14        1044     8281507+  8e  Linux LVM

What I would like to do is increase the size of the second partition  
to be the entire disk, and then grow the logical volume(s) and the  
file systems on it.  BTW, this is all on a VMware virtual disk, so I  
really can't screw things up, as I have a copy of the VMDK files and  
can start over again (and again, and again...).  The disk was  
originally 8GB, and I just resized it with vmware-vdiskmanager.

I have tried to use parted to resize the partition, but I get the  
message "Error: Could not detect file system.", and I can't find a  
way to resize the partition with fdisk and sfdisk.  Am I missing  
something obvious or is this not doable?

Thanks,
Alfred