resizing my slices/partitions - was pruning the Ports tree

[Graham North]

Hello all:

I would like to  expand my FreeBSD partion on the hard drive of which it only has 60%.
The rest of the HD holds an old installation of Win98.

When I first installed FBSD 4.8 I used Partition Magic to carve off 1.2G of a 2.0G HD and give me dual boot capability so as to retain the Win98.    After recently installing a full ports tree I find that my FBSD /usr slice is almost out of file handles.   A sensible solution.. how about removing my 800M of Windows and capturing it for FBSD.   NOTE - please read end of email concerning inodes.
Looking for suggestions and warnings..!

Of course I can blow everything away, reformat and re-install, but my preference would be to:
1) shutdown
2)use my partion magic boot disk to reformat the 800MB windows partion
3)use sysinstall to expand my /usr slice, maybe even resize some of the others

Perhaps I can do this all with sysintall without even shutting down?   I have not used that program since my original install 6 months ago so am not sure of its capabilities, weaknesses and strengths.

Something important to note,  I am not out of disk space but have run out of file handles (BSD calls them Inodes) - so it really is nodes that I need to recapture not space - might this have some implications that necessitate a complete reformat or re-install??

Suggestions and comments greatly appreciated.

Cheers,  Graham/