Extending a slice

[Jerry McAllister]

> Hello,
> 
> I have and existing FreeBSD 5.4 box with 2 6GB hard drives in a RAID 1 
> mirror using gmirror. Due to physical space restrictions I cannot put 
> more drives into this box and yet I need more physical drive space. I 
> have 2 blank 40GB drives to replace my 2 current 6GB drives. I broke the 
> mirror and inserted one 40GB drive into the mirror and removed the 
> remaining 6GB drive. So, now I have a 40GB drive with only 6GB's of 
> space on it and 34GB's of unused space. I have and existing mount point 
> in the 6GB of space called /data. I would like to extend the slice and 
> add the 34GB of unused space to the current /data mount point. Does 
> someone even "extend" an UFS slice? Or do I create a new slice in the 
> unused section and somehow merge the existing slice's /data with the new 
> one? Or am I missing something rudimentary? Any direction would be 
> appreciated.

If the space was already in a slice and you just wanted to expand
a partition in to the unused space, then you could use growfs(8), but
I don't think that will work to expand a slice.

Really, the easiest thing is to use dump(8) to back up the existing 6 GB. 
It will be necessary to do a dump for each file system (partition) you
have in the slice other than swap or /tmp.

Then build the 40 GB disk as needed.   You can best do this from
a fixit CD.    You will need to make a slice with fdisk, then
divide that slice into partitions with bsdlabel.   Then for each
partition except for swap, use newfs to build a file system in them.
When that is done, make temporary mount points, mount the partitions
and restore the dumps.   This sounds long and drawn out telling it,
but it is actually quite easy and works well.

If it is your boot disk, then the fdisk should write the MBR and
the bsdlabel needs to write the boot sector for the slice.  
There is a good example of fdisk and bsddlabel use for creating
a brand new bootable disk with one FreeBSD slice in the bsdlabel
man page near the bottom.   Also, in the last few days I have 
posted several replies to questions that would cover this process
and included extensive examples.    The only difference is that
they weren't for mirrored disks.  But, it sounds like you got
rid of the mirror anyway.   

The dump/rebuild/restore is the way to go
even if you do it to a new mirror of the 40GB drives.  
Or you could write the dumps to one of the rather than tape
and restore from that.

////jerry


> 
> 
> Thank You.
> Peter Clark
> 
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