Resizing disk labels

Konrad Heuer kheuer2 at gwdg.de
Tue Nov 25 04:42:14 PST 2003


On Tue, 25 Nov 2003, Roland Giesler wrote:

> I have installed FreeBSD in a server with the default setting in the label
> editor.  I hope my terminology is correct, since I'm refering to /etc /usr
> etc.  Now I've installed a squid, KDE, DHCP, Java (not complete yet!),
> Apache and some other stuff.  While installing Qmail, I ran out of disk
> space on /etc. but /usr still has 17GB free.
>
> How can I resize the "labels" so /etc grows to 1GB for example?  I've
> searched all over and it appears that one can grow the size, but not shrink
> it?
>
> What I've really looking for is a tool like partitionmagic for FAT or NTFS.
> Does such a tool exist and if not what are my options here?

You can use growfs to increase the size of a filesystem (I suppose this is
what you mean), but only if you have free disk space available adjacent to
the cylinders allocated for the filesystem in question.

You cannot decrease the size of filesystem without recreating it.

Thus you have the following possibilites to choose from:

1) Reinstall FreeBSD and use more suitable filesystem sizes.

2) Backup the data of the filesystem which is too large and adjacent to
   the filesystem which is too small, enlarge that with growfs, recreate
   other filesystem with smaller size and restore the data.

3) Try to identify subdirectories containing a lot of data within the
   filesystem which is too small, move them by mv to a filesystem with
   enough free space and symlink them back (ln -s) to the old location.
   But do not move the whole /etc directory from the root to another
   filesystem!

Best regards

Konrad Heuer (kheuer2 at gwdg.de)  ____            ___  _______
GWDG                           / __/______ ___ / _ )/ __/ _ \
Am Fassberg                   / _// __/ -_) -_) _  |\ \/ // /
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