Date: Sat, 1 Feb 2003 11:45:50 +0000 From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> To: Free BSD Questions list <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Resizing partions Message-ID: <20030201114550.GD84798@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophi> In-Reply-To: <20030201014032.GA23426@teddy.fas.com> References: <20030201014032.GA23426@teddy.fas.com>
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On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 08:40:32PM -0500, stan wrote:
>
> I've got a laptop that I originaly partioned inot a windoze, and FreeBSD
> partiton. I'm going to upgrade this unit this weekend, and I wnat to
> concatenate the 2 partions. Is there a way to do this? (Yes, it's the m$
> parition I'm nuking).
>
The easiest way to do what you want is to back-up all the files and
stuff you want to keep from your existing FreeBSD and Windows
installations, and then just re-install FreeBSD over the whole disk.
That will give you one fdisk(8) slice (ad0s1) containing the FreeBSD
disklabel(8) partitions (ad0s1a, ad0s1b etc.)
If you haven't got the resources to back-up all your stuff, you can
just convert your windows slice to a FreeBSD slice, create a FreeBSD
partition taking up the whole slice and mount it at an appropriate
place in your filesystem. You can use fdisk(8), disklabel(8) and
mount(8) to do that, but you'll probably find it easier to use
/stand/sysinstall -- just take care that you don't accidentally
re-initialise your existing FreeBSD partitions.
If your windows slice happens to lie immediately following your
freebsd slice, then it is in theory possible to rewrite Sector 0 of
your disk so that the two slices are merged, and then extend the last
FreeBSD partition to fill up the added space. However, that's a very
tricky operation with a high risk of trashing your system, so you
shouldn't do it unless you've got good backups of everything. Of
course, if you've got backups then your best option is just to
reinstall, and then recover the backups over the newly installed
system, taking care to preserve files like /etc/fstab.
Cheers,
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks
Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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