On Tuesday 23 October 2007, Chad Perrin wrote:
> I have need to alter some partition sizes on a (laptop)
system I use
> daily, with FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE installed. Are there
tools you'd
> recommend for this, that should be stable and not prone
to hosing up my
> filesystems? In particular, I probably don't need to
shrink any
> partitions -- only grow them -- but I'm not sure how I
want to handle
> this at this time. I worry a bit about using some
Linux LiveCD's
> partition management tools on a FreeBSD system. Any
advice would be
> appreciated.
The best tools (IMO) for this are dump and restore. If you
have external
storage, storage on another system accessible by a
reasonably fast network
from your laptop, or dvd burner (if the example here[1]
works, I haven't
tried it) then this will definitely be your best option.
Make your backup
using dump and verify that it's complete, intact, and able
to be restored
from a fixit CD. Then (still from the fixit CD) blow away
your existing
partitions, make your new ones, and run restore to put your
data back.
If that option doesn't appeal to you you should still make
and verify a
complete backup before doing anything else. Depending on how
much free
space (and possibly swap) you have on your disk, you could
possibly do a
few different passes using growfs (in the base system) to
this effect:
identify next (in block order on the disk) partition to be
grown.
if there is no (or not enough) unpartitioned space after
the growing
partition, move everything from the next partition to other
partitions,
possibly creating temporary partitions closer to the end of
the disk, or
permanently relocating one or more partitions to the end of
the disk, or
temporarily converting your swap partition to a filesystem
(be sure to not
use it as swap for the duration, of course)...
destroy the newly freed partition
use growfs
if there's room and a need, recreate the destroyed
partition and restore
its contents from elsewhere
repeat
I share your doubts about Linux utilities being able to
handle UFS (esp.
UFS2) filesystems correctly.
JN
[1] h
ttp://fuse4bsd.creo.hu/localcgi/man-cgi.cgi?dump+8
Specifically, the example command line is:
/sbin/dump -0u -L -C16 -B4589840 -P 'growisofs -Z
/dev/cd0=/dev/fd/0' /u
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