Resizing Partitions, Losing Windows XP...

[Jeff Cross]

Jerry McAllister wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 22, 2006 at 01:23:28PM -0500, Jeff Cross wrote:
> 
>> I have been dual booting FreeBSD and Windows XP for quite sometime.
>> However, I never boot into Windows XP any longer.  I can pretty much do
>> everything I need to do from within FreeBSD.  Is there a way that I can
>> wipe out the Windows XP partition, resize the FreeBSD partition, and
>> install a standard FreeBSD MBR (no boot manager) without slicking and
>> reloading the hard drive?
>>
>> I really like the way I have my stuff setup within FreeBSD and would
>> hate to have to recreate a lot of it as well as install applications
>> over again.  Could I do a dump of my current FreeBSD partition, reformat
>> and partition the whole drive, install FreeBSD, and then restore my data
>> to the new partition or would this cause issues?
> 
> That would be one good way of doing it.    Just make sure and check
> your dumps before wiping everything. (create a scratch space.  Cd to it
> and read a few things back from the dumps and check them.   
> 
> You don't need to reformat the drive - that is too low level for this.
> Just fdisk it and put all the disk in one slice - slice 1.  Make that 
> slice marked bootable.    Then use bsdlabel (disklabel pre 5.xxx) to 
> divide up the slice in to partitions.   They will need to be the
> same partition identifiers (a-h) as used currently.  Finally, 
> use newfs to build filesystems on the partitions (except for swap)
> and then restore the dumps to their original partitions.
> Make sure you mount the partition as something and then cd in to
> that appropriate partition to do the restore.
> 
> You will need to do the wiping and rebuilding from some other
> media such as a fixit CD or another bootable disk.   You can't
> wipe the slice that you are running from.
> 
> 
> An alternative would be to leave the existing slice alone, but
> use fdisk to mark the MS slice as a FreeBSD slice (not bootable)
> and then either create one single partition in that slice or 
> divide it as you choose and use newfs to create file systems.
> Then, create a mount point for each new partition you made (put
> them in /etc/fstab and mount them up.  Then move some of your big
> directories in the existing FreeBSD slice over then and made 
> symlinks to them.    That way you would free up room in the FreeBSD
> bootable slice, but not have to dump/restore and rebuild everything.
> It is quicker and works just as well, but slightly less clean, though
> it could be helpful if your file systems are too large for your
> backup media.
> 
> ////jerry
> 
>> Any assistance is greatly appreciated!
>>
>> Jeff Cross
>> http://www.averageadmins.com/
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> 
> 
This sounds scary, I mean ok, but will doing what you have mentioned in
this post do anything for the MBR?  Is that why I would be setting the
bootable flag in fdisk?  I am currently using NTLOADER to boot Windows
XP and FreeBSD 6.1-SECURITY.

Jeff Cross
http://www.averageadmins.com/