Resizing Partitions, Losing Windows XP...

[Jerry McAllister]

On Fri, Sep 22, 2006 at 01:23:28PM -0500, Jeff Cross wrote:

> I have been dual booting FreeBSD and Windows XP for quite sometime.
> However, I never boot into Windows XP any longer.  I can pretty much do
> everything I need to do from within FreeBSD.  Is there a way that I can
> wipe out the Windows XP partition, resize the FreeBSD partition, and
> install a standard FreeBSD MBR (no boot manager) without slicking and
> reloading the hard drive?
> 
> I really like the way I have my stuff setup within FreeBSD and would
> hate to have to recreate a lot of it as well as install applications
> over again.  Could I do a dump of my current FreeBSD partition, reformat
> and partition the whole drive, install FreeBSD, and then restore my data
> to the new partition or would this cause issues?

That would be one good way of doing it.    Just make sure and check
your dumps before wiping everything. (create a scratch space.  Cd to it
and read a few things back from the dumps and check them.   

You don't need to reformat the drive - that is too low level for this.
Just fdisk it and put all the disk in one slice - slice 1.  Make that 
slice marked bootable.    Then use bsdlabel (disklabel pre 5.xxx) to 
divide up the slice in to partitions.   They will need to be the
same partition identifiers (a-h) as used currently.  Finally, 
use newfs to build filesystems on the partitions (except for swap)
and then restore the dumps to their original partitions.
Make sure you mount the partition as something and then cd in to
that appropriate partition to do the restore.

You will need to do the wiping and rebuilding from some other
media such as a fixit CD or another bootable disk.   You can't
wipe the slice that you are running from.


An alternative would be to leave the existing slice alone, but
use fdisk to mark the MS slice as a FreeBSD slice (not bootable)
and then either create one single partition in that slice or 
divide it as you choose and use newfs to create file systems.
Then, create a mount point for each new partition you made (put
them in /etc/fstab and mount them up.  Then move some of your big
directories in the existing FreeBSD slice over then and made 
symlinks to them.    That way you would free up room in the FreeBSD
bootable slice, but not have to dump/restore and rebuild everything.
It is quicker and works just as well, but slightly less clean, though
it could be helpful if your file systems are too large for your
backup media.

////jerry

> 
> Any assistance is greatly appreciated!
> 
> Jeff Cross
> http://www.averageadmins.com/
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"