Striped Drive for OS File System

[Lee Dilkie]

Donald,

Yes, it can be done but as a gconcat rather than a gstripe if you need 
to expand in place.

essentially,

unmount /usr
create gconcat from existing /usr and new drive (use raw drive.).
then use growfs to expand gconcatted drive
mount gconcatted version of /usr

If you can do a backup and restore of /usr, you could create a stripped 
drive instead (if they are the same size or thereabouts).

The only gotcha that I had was in FreeBSD 5.5. Growfs doesn't handle 
really big disks (which is what you get here). I found that the patch to 
fix growfs in 6.2 and manually did it and rebuilt growfs and it worked 
great. I've done it twice now, adding a third drive to my gconcat array.

Also. I only used gconcat with the raw drives, ie "gconcat label  
big_drive /dev/ad2 /dev/ad3 /dev/ad4" but I presume it works the same 
with slices/partitions.

-lee

Donald E. Holt wrote:
> I haven't seen this particular situation discussed, nor have I been able
> to find any specific information on the web. I am not experienced in
> GEOM or vinum, so I may be asking a dumb question. If so, I apologize.
>
> My system has FreeBSD installed across 2 SCSI drives. /dev/da2
> holds /, /tmp, /var, and a swap. /dev/da4 is devoted to /usr and another
> swap. A third drive (dev/da5) is dedicated to a Win4BSD virtual machine,
> and is mounted as /WinXP (there are still a few MS apps I can't get
> around using).
>
> I'd like to expand /usr fs to an additional SCSI drive (physically
> present now, but unused). Would it be possible to do that, perhaps with
> gstripe, without distroying data on the current drive?
>
> Again, sorry if I've asked one of those eye-rolling, forehead-thumping
> questions.
>
> Thanks!
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