resizing a memstick image, on FreeBSD 8

[Perry Hutchison]

Anton Sayetsky <vsasjason at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2015-12-06 7:00 GMT+02:00 Perry Hutchison <perryh at pluto.rain.com>:
> > Is it possible to accomplish that on the FreeBSD 8 system that I'm
> > using to set things up for the FreeBSD 10.2 install?  While it is
> > the FreeBSD 8 kernel that suggests "recovery":
> >   GEOM: da2: the secondary GPT table is corrupt or invalid.
> >   GEOM: da2: using the primary only -- recovery suggested.
> >
> > the FreeBSD 8 gpart apparently does not understand "recover":
> >   # gpart recover da2
> >   gpart: Unknown command: recover.
...
> > I didn't find any mention of recovering from a missing or corrupted
> > secondary GPT in either the FreeBSD 8 Handbook or the FreeBSD 8
> > gpart(8) manpage.
>
> You can recover GPT after updating to 10. Even if one of the GPT
> copies corrupted, disk is fully functional.

That depends how one defines "full" functionality.  In this case,
without resizing, it is not possible to create an additional
partition so as to utilize the ~3GB of unused space on the "disk",
e.g. for packages that one intends to install before having the
network up and running.

I suppose it would be possible to self-recover it (while running
the live FS from it) -- the geom foot-shooting flag might need to
be set -- but it does seem odd that the FreeBSD 8 kernel suggests
"recovery" and yet the recovery mechanism is not easily found in
the FreeBSD 8 documentation (if such a mechanism even exists).