resize/combine disk partitions

Micah Lieske micahjon at u.washington.edu
Thu Sep 15 16:45:47 PDT 2005



hal wrote:
> I have three adjacent disk partitions as reported by
> bsdlabel.
> 
>     ad0s1g /local
>     ad0s1b swap
>     ad0s1h /home
> 
> /local is at around 107% full all the time and needs to
> grow.  /home is nearly empty ( new machine).
> 
> What I want to do is combine ad0s1g and h into
> a new /local and add another disk for /home.
> 
> I have tried sysinstall disklabel to delete
> the three partitions g, b, and h then recreate swap and
> /local.  But noooooo the program says it can't write
> to the disk.  BTW /local and /home were umounted and I
> was in single user mode.
> 
> I suppose I could get creative with mount points but I
> would rather resize/combine the three partitions into two.
> 
> How can I do that (short of a reinstall)?
> 
> hal

If you just want to wipe out the partitions and recreate, you can use 
sysinstall as you tried, with one exception that I found.  You have to 
boot from the live CD (CD 1 in 5.4).  Sysinstall doesn't seem to want to 
write labels out to drives that are in use.

I recently juggled ALL my partitions around and sysinstall in single 
user mode with only / mounted wasn't enough.  I had to reboot and use 
the live/install CD.  Keep in mind that the "w" command to write changes 
is invisible when using the sysinstall from the install CD, but it still 
works and you still have to use it.

Micah


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