How to safely merge two slices on harddisk?

[Malcolm Kay]

On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 04:19, Rob wrote:
> Malcolm,
>
> Thank you for your detailed answer to my question.
>
> Malcolm Kay wrote:
> > On Mon, 9 Feb 2004 13:46, Rob wrote:
> >     Do not change the offset of 'f'. If 'g' does not physically
> >     follow 'f' on the disk then this is not going to work -- give up
> >     now!!!
>
> How can I find that out? Is it the slice order in the disk label editor
> from /stand/sysinstall :

No! What you want is disklabel (see man page). On 5.x this seems to
have been replaced by bsdlabel -- but I have no experience with 5.x.

You can first gather the partition information; and later when you 
decide what you want to do you can modify the table using this utility.

It shows partition sizes and offsets in sectors; and assists in editing these.
But if you don't already know of this utility then tread very carefully.
Even small fiddles if you don't know what you are doing can make it 
almost impossible to recover any of the information in the slice.

>
>
> Disk: ad1       Partition name: ad1s1   Free: 0 blocks (0MB)
>
> Part      Mount          Size Newfs
> ----      -----          ---- -----
> ad1s1a    <none>        100MB *
> ad1s1e    <none>       3100MB *
> ad1s1f    <none>       3100MB *
> ad1s1g    <none>       3100MB *
> ad1s1h    <none>        300MB *
> ad1s1b    <none>        300MB *
> ad1s1d    <none>      66316MB *
>
>
> In this table f and g are back-to-front lined up.
> Does that mean f physically follows g?
>
>  > Asking a question and giving a non-existent email address is quite rude.
>
> Sorry, but I consider a potential spam risk when using a real address on
> this publicly accessible list. The list is my communication medium and I
> monitor the list on gmane. I hope you understand.

Of course spam occurs but almost everyone else on the list posts a genuine
e-mail address. Why should you get special privileges?


Malcolm Kay