FreeBSD as VMWare guest / disk resizing

[Devin Teske]

It can be done but it's not easy and not pretty.

You'll have to rewrite the partition scheme to grow *only* the last partition and then use growfs on the last partition to zero the new inodes within its newly defined range.

You'll of course need to boot from another medium to do this.

I usually use DruidBSD for this:

DruidBSD-1.0b1.iso

(a tiny 23.5MB ISO that you can write to thumb disk with dd or burn to cd; either works fine)

Boot from it and use the tools like "disklabel -e /dev/yourdisk"

But… be extremely careful and do your mathematics!

I know this isn't a complete step-by-step guide, but I wanted to get the answer out there that this is possible and it's a known quantity, but it can be dangerous if you get the math wrong when editing the disklabel positions, for example. If you can get that part right, the rest is easy (growfs).
-- 
Devin



On Dec 17, 2012, at 4:15 PM, Luke Bakken wrote:

> Hello everyone -
> 
> I'm looking for a way to get FreeBSD 8 / 9 to detect that an already
> existing disk has grown. I have FreeBSD running as a guest within
> vSphere ESX 5. Here is the output of camcontrol showing how the disks
> are detected within the OS:
> 
> [root at QA1HWFBSD83201 ~]# camcontrol inquiry da0
> pass0: <VMware Virtual disk 1.0> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device
> pass0: 320.000MB/s transfers (160.000MHz, offset 127, 16bit), Command
> Queueing Enabled
> 
> In the VM settings I can increase the disk size but I can't seem to
> find the right command within FreeBSD to force it to detect the new,
> larger size without a reboot. 'camcontrol rescan all' works great to
> detect a new drive but doesn't detect a larger disk. Within a Linux
> distribution like Debian, the following command will detect the larger
> drive:
> 
> echo 1 > /sys/class/scsi_device/0:0:0:0/device/rescan
> 
> I apologize if this has been answered in the archives or online but I
> just haven't been able to get a definitive answer if this is possible,
> and how.
> 
> Thanks so much in advance,
> Luke
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