If you have partitioned a disk using ‘fdisk’, most probably the partition table is using ‘MBR‘. Nowadays, one important disadvantage of MBR is the lack of supporting larger than 2 TB partitions. So, if you want to extend a partition while disk is using MBR, first the disk partition table needs to be converted to ‘GPT‘. To find difference between MBR and GPT see here as well.

Generally, to resize a partition, it needs to be deleted and re-created using new size or end sector. A good general approach to enlarge a partition while not losing data is explained in this link. You can follow this how-to with a slight but important difference: instead of using ‘fdisk’, ‘gptdisk’ or ‘gdisk’ should be used. ‘gdisk’ supports GPT and if you use the existing specifications (first sector) for new partition, there would be no data loss. When doing conversion, a warning will be triggered:

THIS OPERATION IS POTENTIALLY DESTRUCTIVE! Exit by typing 'q' if you don't want to convert your MBR partitions to GPT format!

But it’s okay! Don’t worry and continue. Then, it will ask for partition type, because the current partition type is based on MBR partition table. You can choose ‘ef00’ which is ‘EFI System’. Go ahead and create the new partition with new size, save the partition table and you are done. Then ‘resize2fs’ can be used to enlarge volume.

p.s – instead of enlarging partition, another choice (rather than MBR to GPT) is using LVM to create large logical volumes containing multiple physical volumes.