Moving paritions around

[Garrett Cooper]

John Levine wrote:
> I set up my laptop to dual boot between W1nd at ws and FreeBSD.  When I
> first set it up I made the partitions the same size, but since then I
> found I do a lot more with FreeBSD so I'd rather give it more space.
> 
> So the last time I had to reinstall Windows from scratch, I made its
> partition smaller.  Now there's a big chunk of free space between
> the two partitions.  Should I expect the following to work?
> 
> (back everything up, duh)
> 
> Boot from a CD, change the partition table to make the FreeBSD partition
> start right after the Windows partition
> 
> Use dd to move down the existing FreeBSD partition data so it starts
> at the beginning of the new partition
> 
> Use growfs to give the extra space to my /usr filesystem, which is at
> the end of the existing partition
> 
> Or should I just back it all up to a USB disk, reformat, and restore it,
> which will take considerably longer?
> 
> R's,
> John

It's like a sorting programming problem. In order to move objects of
similar sizes between 2 locations, you need 3 locations total : 1
destination, 1 target, and 1 temporary.

Similar ideologies apply here. You need to a) dump(3) the data from your
FreeBSD disk into a safe spot, and b) copy over all of your Windows
files into (another?) safe spot, then, c) install XP over from scratch
with the new scheme, and d) boot using a freebsd snapshot iso, copy all
of your files over again by "un-dump(3)'ing" them, and modify /etc/fstab
accordingly.

Cheers,
-Garrett