growfs(8) - no fear!

[Chuck Swiger]

Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> i asked the question recently, no answers, but finally did it this way 
> and all worked fine. i shifted my partition left with dd and resized 
> with growfs.

Thanksgiving break may have taken at least some of the reading list population 
out of regular contact, at least briefly.  (Happy turkey day + 2, list. :-)

I'd rather backup and reformat, or just use symlinks, then fool with growfs 
myself.  I've tried it as an experiment, and it seemed to work, but I don't 
have enough data to really say more than that.

> but can bsdlabel be forced to write label with overlapping slices? for 
> temporary operations it will be useful if i know what i'm doing.

I think using "sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16" may help, or some close variant 
(check the list archives), there is an anti-footshooting mechanism in place 
which will prevent you from changing the partition table if you have mounted 
partitions.

Note that you can re-run sysinstall and use the label edittor in there if you like.

-- 
-Chuck