How to safely merge two slices on harddisk?

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> 
> Jerry McAllister wrote:
> >>
> > 
> > In any case, do not use /stand/sysinstall for this.   You need more direct 
> > control and should use disklabel directly.   As mentioned in my previous 
> > posting use the command  
> >                          'disklabel -e -r asd1s1'  
> > and then edit the tmp file 
> 
> Malcolm Kay wrote:
>  >
>  > A good chance it will work -- but pre-existing 'f' and 'g' data is lost.
> 
> 
> Thank you guys for your help.
> I actually did use sysinstall (sorry, Jerry) and mission is accomplished.

You are lucky.  sysinstall makes some assumptions in the way it 
calls disklabel.   Your situation fit neatly within those assumptions.

> Yes, indeed, I lost the data is the two merged partitions 'f' and 'g', but
> that was no problem; I needed to keep the data in all other partitions.
> Sysinstall did all that for me.

Well, it just let you define those other partitions in the same
way they were before so effectively it left them alone.

> 
> Meanwhile I learned a lot more about disklabel, thanks to your comments.
> Great and many thanks,

Disklabel is actually quite easy to use.   The man page combined with
the fdisk man page can be rather confusing.   The approach to writing
them seem rather convoluted to me.  If I felt competent enough on the
subject, I would take a shot at rewriting them, but there are two
many details about the extra features I do no know about.  But, the
main stuff is reall quite straightforward to use.

////jerry

> Rob.
> _______________________________________________