Fwd: More than 8 partitions

[Jon Theil Nielsen]

2010/5/1 Da Rock <freebsd-questions at herveybayaustralia.com.au>

On Fri, 2010-04-30 at 19:44 +0200, Jon Theil Nielsen wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I'm running 8.0-Release on an external usb hard drive. and have dual-boot
> > with FreeBSD on da0s2 and Windows XP on da0s1. I made a setup via
> Sysinstall
> > with 7 partitions:
> >
> > /dev/da0s2a on / (ufs, local)
> > /dev/da0s2b (swap)
> > /dev/da0s2d on /var (ufs, local, soft-updates)
> > /dev/da0s2e on /tmp (ufs, local, soft-updates)
> > /dev/da0s2f on /usr (ufs, local, soft-updates)
> > /dev/da0s2h on /var/log (ufs, local, soft-updates)
> > /dev/da0s2g on /home (ufs, local, soft-updates)
> >
> > I have about 660 GB left unused on da0s2 that I would like to use for
> > backups. But I can't figure out how to create one more partition.
> > If i create a file for bsdlabel like
> >
> > #       size    offset  fstype
> > i:      *       0       4.2BSD
> >
> > I get the following error message: "line 2: partition name out of range
> a-h:
> > i"
> > I have also tried with gpart:
> >
> > gpart add -s 500G -t freebsd -f x da0s2
> >
> > I get something like "gpart: index '9': No space left on device"
> >
> > I thought that 8.0 should support more than 8 partitions. Maybe it does,
> but
> > then I don't know how to do.
> > Any ideas?
>
> Use vinum - thats what I needed to do. Mind I had around 15 partitions
> to work out so it is effective...
>
> Maybe I should consider that too. But this installation is quite
experimental, and I just thought that it would be a simple task to make a
few extra partitions, since that was what I read about when 8.0 was
released. But I haven't found any documentation on the issue.
I guess I either  have to use some non-FreeBSD tool to change the size of my
slices or backup the installation to another drive, rerun fdisk etc., and
copy the system back.

'Regards,
Jon