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From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org>
Date: 16 Sep 2005 08:47:48 -0400
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Subject: Re: resize/combine disk partitions
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Micah Lieske <micahjon@u.washington.edu> writes:

> hal wrote:
> > I have three adjacent disk partitions as reported by
> > bsdlabel.
> >     ad0s1g /local
> >     ad0s1b swap
> >     ad0s1h /home
> > /local is at around 107% full all the time and needs to
> > grow.  /home is nearly empty ( new machine).
> > What I want to do is combine ad0s1g and h into
> > a new /local and add another disk for /home.
> > I have tried sysinstall disklabel to delete
> > the three partitions g, b, and h then recreate swap and
> > /local.  But noooooo the program says it can't write
> > to the disk.  BTW /local and /home were umounted and I
> > was in single user mode.
> > I suppose I could get creative with mount points but I
> > would rather resize/combine the three partitions into two.
> > How can I do that (short of a reinstall)?
> > hal
> 
> If you just want to wipe out the partitions and recreate, you can use
> sysinstall as you tried, with one exception that I found.  You have to
> boot from the live CD (CD 1 in 5.4).  Sysinstall doesn't seem to want
> to write labels out to drives that are in use.

Less elegant, but much easier, would be to move some large directory
trees from /local to /home, and not repartition at all.