[psyche101]

Hi All
Does anyone know how to "grow" one partition into another ?
I have used a 1 gig HD for my /, /var/ swap space and a partition I created called usr1. I then put /usr on a 2 gig HD by itself.
Reason for this was that if I shared the 2 gig with /, /var and /usr, I would find that I ran out of disc space real fast, mostly when compliling.
Moving the ports collection to /usr1 does not work. Although if you move a single port it does seem to install OK.
I would like to merge (Grow is term I have heard used) /usr and /usr1 into /usr to avoid any install problems and increase the size of /usr for some more ports. Love the ports collection. Great stuff, could be happy playing with all that for years I reckon. I want to find an Autocad alternative for BSD next, to see wat results I can get from that.
Can anyone give me a starting point or tell me where I can read up on growing (merging ?) partitions across seperate hard drives.

Thanks

[|MiNi0n|]

You can move ports wherever you want to, you just need to symlink it in /usr so you don't get make failures. Assuming you move your ports to /usr1:

mv ports /usr1/

cd /usr

ln -s /usr1/ports .

That should do it, I do that all the time.

[Strog]

There is growfs for expanding partitions within a slice.
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=growfs&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+4.8-RELEASE&format=html

Minion's suggestion would probably be what you are looking for in this case. While it is possible to span across drives, it would make the solution more complicated and have more potential for issues than you would probably want to deal with.

[|MiNi0n|]

Yup, as Strog suggest, growfs is an option and he is definitely right about it being more complicated :) It's quite an advanced task. Another option which I have done is to use dump and restore to file to move things around from partition to partition. If you've got the extra disk space to utilize or a spare disk, this is another option that is somewhere inbetween the symlink and using growfs.

See this link for more:
http://lantech.geekvenue.net/chucktips/jason/chuck/1004897633/index_html

On another note, if I'm not mistaken, doesn't the latest version of Partiton Magic support FreeBSD partitions?

[psyche101]

Thanks

I will be reding up on growfs, thanks for the tip. I tried the ln -s /usr1/ports
option, worked great, only prob is that user has to run x as root now, I am guessing I probably should have run that command as root ? Has solved my space problems, thanks again everyone :)

[Strog]

There is growfs for expanding partitions within a slice.
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=growfs&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+4.8-RELEASE&format=html

Minion's suggestion would probably be what you are looking for in this case. While it is possible to span across drives, it would make the solution more complicated and have more potential for issues than you would probably want to deal with.

[psyche101]

Thanks everyone :)

Yep, minions suggestion of using ln -s worked great, just what I needed, however, I ran the command as a user, not logged in as root, now that user (I have a few in this machine, maybe a bit schizo ?, I'll ask myself later) cannot log in to X, unless at root. How do I allow that user to have x back ?

Thanks again

[silverlokk]

Try this, from the ports:

Port: wrapper-1.0_2
Path: /usr/ports/x11/wrapper
Info: Wrapper for XFree86-4 server
Maint: trevor@FreeBSD.org
Index: x11

Regards

[ealwen]

Minion, I have access to Partition magic 8.0 and I am sure it isn't able to manipulate FreeBSD partitions. It can do linux though.