How to merge an unused partition.

[Loren M. Lang]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2005 at 09:09:47PM -0600, Chris wrote:
> Heya folks - here's my issue; I removed a OS from my drive and that freed
> up 10 gig. I wish to "merge" the free 10 gig into my FreeBSD file system.
> 
> Here's what she looks like via fdisk:
> 
> Disk name:      ad1                                    FDISK Partition 
> Editor
> DISK Geometry:  9729 cyls/255 heads/63 sectors = 156296385 sectors (76316MB)
> 
> Offset       Size(MB)        End     Name  PType       Desc  Subtype
> 
>         0      10236   20964824        -     12     unused        0
>  20964825      66079  156296384    ad1s1      8    freebsd      165
> 156296385          2  156301487        -     12     unused        0
> 
> 
> So - what do I need to do to take the 1st line and merge it into the 
> existing system?

The big problem with merging it in is that everything is designed to
grow at the end, not at the beginning.  growfs can be used to extend a
filesystem afterwards, but not before.

One idea that might work is to use some kind of volume management system
like vinum.  If your current system already used that, this would be a
simple matter.  What you could do though it to setup vinum on the unused
partition and start moving data over.  Eventually you could extend vinum
with the second partition once all the data is moved over.  If you
aren't using more than about 9 gigs total on freebsd right now, then you
just have to move data over once.

> 
> Sorry for the formatting
> 
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