From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG  Fri Mar 30 03:17:13 2007
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Date: 30 Mar 2007 02:50:31 -0000
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From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
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Cc: freebsd@dfwlp.com
Subject: Moving paritions around
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I set up my laptop to dual boot between W1nd@ws and FreeBSD.  When I
first set it up I made the partitions the same size, but since then I
found I do a lot more with FreeBSD so I'd rather give it more space.

So the last time I had to reinstall Windows from scratch, I made its
partition smaller.  Now there's a big chunk of free space between
the two partitions.  Should I expect the following to work?

(back everything up, duh)

Boot from a CD, change the partition table to make the FreeBSD partition
start right after the Windows partition

Use dd to move down the existing FreeBSD partition data so it starts
at the beginning of the new partition

Use growfs to give the extra space to my /usr filesystem, which is at
the end of the existing partition

Or should I just back it all up to a USB disk, reformat, and restore it,
which will take considerably longer?

R's,
John