looking for a disk partition ("slice") editor

[Mel]

On Sunday 21 September 2008 18:50:09 Chad Perrin wrote:

> Perhaps, if there's some *good* reason why we *shouldn't* want to "mess
> with slices" while the system is running, someone can explain why.

From geom(4):
     Several flags are provided for tracing GEOM operations and unlocking pro-
     tection mechanisms via the kern.geom.debugflags sysctl.  All of these
     flags are off by default, and great care should be taken in turning them
     on.

     0x10 (allow foot shooting)
           Allow writing to Rank 1 providers.  This would, for example, allow
           the super-user to overwrite the MBR on the root disk or write ran-
           dom sectors elsewhere to a mounted disk.  The implications are
           obvious.

There should be several partition editors in sysutils/*, so the only thing you 
really need is to set kern.geom.debugflags to 16.
A quick scan of gpart(8) man page might have support for logical paritions, 
but I'm not an expert:
     add      Add a new partition to the partitioning scheme given by geom.
              The partition begins on the logical block address given by the
              -b start option.  Its size is expressed in logical block numbers
              and given by the -s size option.  The type of the partition is
              given by the -t type option.  Partition types are discussed in
              the section entitled "Partition Types".



-- 
Mel

Problem with today's modular software: they start with the modules
    and never get to the software part.