first time with growfs

[Pietralla, Siegfried P]

hi scott,

i believe you can only use growfs with contiguous disk space.

but, with unix you don't need to increase the size of the freebsd partition
( actually called slice in this context ). you do not need to use growfs to
use more space. you have at least three other options that will let you use
any other space on your disk that will be transparent from an application /
end-user perspective :

1.

just partition the new slice any way you like and mount the space wherever
you need it. remember that you can mount partitions anywhere in your
directory tree. e.g. if /usr/src is taking up most of the space in /usr,
just copy /usr/src to a new partition that you've temporarily mounted as
/mnt, then rm -rf /usr/src, umount /mnt and mount the partition it under
/usr/src.

2.

just create a big /usr2, move directories and then use symlinks all over the
place :)

3.

use vinum for the entire new slice. move stuff to vinum supported
partitions. reformat your old slice to use vinum where possible. then extend
vinum volumes and use growfs to your heart's content. if this sounds too
much like hard work, see options 1 and 2.

regards,
siegfried.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Renna [mailto:srenna at vdbmusic.com]
> Sent: Sunday, 12 October 2003 1:54
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: first time with growfs
> 
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> So I've been reading the man page for growfs and I'm ready to use it,
> however, I'm concerned about not utilizing it properly and destroying
> things.  Here's what I got:
> 
> I have my primary drive(ad0) split up like this.  The first 
> partition is
> a 6GB space which holds all of the slices for my FreeBSD 5.0.  The
> second partition following that I've reserved as 6GB for my future
> OpenBSD install.  Now, I'd like to create a new partition right AFTER
> the OpenBSD reserved space and I'd like to add that 
> additional space on
> for the FreeBSD portion.  I'd like this to be transparent.  Basically,
> I'm trying to increase the overall size of the FreeBSD partition.  Can
> anyone recommend a best practice for this or point me to a good
> reference?
> 
> Scott Renna
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to 
> "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>