changing the postion of a partion in fdisk

[Jerry McAllister]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 10:33:04PM -0500, Aryeh M. Friedman wrote:

> 
> I have my FreeBSD partition as partition 1 and my ntfs as partition 2
> but Vista insists that there is no suitable partion to install to
> (even though the ntfs partition is big enough)... after some research
> I found that vista absolutely insists that the ntfs partition be
> partition 1... how do I swap them and/or delete the ntfs one and
> renumber it so freebsd is in partion slot 2 (with nothing in 1 and
> then I can use fdisk to make a new slot 1)

Well, you can use fdisk from the fixit shell to make your slice 2 (note 
the primary divisions are called 'slices' in FreeBSD) in to a FreeBSD 
type and then create your FreeBSD partitions in it and build FreeBSD 
filesystems there.    

Then, still using the fixit, use dump/restore to copy the contents of
the FreeBSD filesystems over.
  Assuming the major slices are ad0s1 and ad0s2, then something like:
  mkdir /oldroot
  mount /ad0s1a /oldroot
  mkdir /newroot
  mount /ad0s2a /newroot
  cd /newroot
  dump 0af - / | restore -rf -

That will get the root partition/filesystem.
Do appropriately similar for the rest of the FreeBSD filesystems.

Note that while in fixit, the running root (/) is in a memory
filesystem which will go away after you reboot.  So, those
mount points you create (oldroot, newroot, etc) are temporary.

Then use a utility such as gparted (freely downloadable as ISO)
to convert the #1 slice into NTFS and install Vista there.
You might be able to get FreeBSD's fdisk to do the convesion to
NTFS, but I have never tried that.  You would have to know the
code number for it.

////jerry

> 
> - --
> Aryeh M. Friedman
> FloSoft Systems, Java Developer Tools
> http://www.flosoft-systems.com
> Developer, not business, friendly.
> 
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