Re: Spam ? - Re: Increasing partition size by removing partitions
I dont know if it going to be of any use, but in the past, I have used a free but very low level partition editing tool called Ranish http://www.ranish.com/part/ It does allow for moving of any partitions (or slices in BSD terms) Watch out though, as there is no real checks done against commands you issue (It WILL do exactly what you ask - be it right or wrong) I have used it (v2.44 - the lastest beta version) in the past for moving, growing and shrinking of NTFS and FAT32 partitions with a FreeBSD slice on the drive, just never tried changing a BSD slice it self If I remember right, if you try to run the editor under windows 2000 or XP, it will try to create a bootable floppy disk which might be more useful to FreeBSD users Like I said, it might not be any use in this instance, but probably still worth a look, just incase Paul On Sunday 28 September 2008 02:38:14 Maxim Khitrov wrote: On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Aryeh M. Friedman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have a disk that is laid out with partion 0 being NTFS and 1 being FreeBSD. I want to remove the NTFS partition and grow the FreeBSD one but all the docs I have seen only talk about how to do this if the new part of the partition is at the end of the partition you wish to grow. How do I go about this? Assuming that there is no (free) software that will do it for you, and you are unable for some reason to move the data to another place and repartition the drive, you have to manually move your FreeBSD partition back and then extend it. I've never done this before, but if I had to try it the first time I would do the following: 1. Try very hard to find some other hard drive where I can just dump the data and avoid this whole thing to begin with. :) 2. Boot from a FreeBSD livecd, attach a usb drive for storing some temporary files and mount it under /mnt. 3. Create a back-up of your master boot record (dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/mnt/mbr-backup bs=512 count=1). Assuming here that your drive is ad0. 4. Use fdisk to get the start and size values of your two partitions (in sectors). 5. Erase the ntfs partition (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0s1 bs=2m). 6. Copy your FreeBSD partition to the former start location of ntfs (dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/dev/ad0 bs=512 iseek=start of partition 2 oseek=start of partition 1 count=size of partition 2). Using bs=512 is slow, but it makes it easier for you to just take the numbers that fdisk gives you and plug them in. 7. Once this is done you will need to edit your mbr sector to overwrite the first partition entry with the second, but certain fields will need to be updated... I recommend you use a hex editor and work on the file that you saved in step 3. You can try the same thing with a partition editor, but you may not get the desired results. For the manual (and more fun) method, the partition table begins at offset 0x01BE, and each entry is 16 bytes long. That means that you need to copy 16 bytes starting at address 0x01CE to address 0x01BE. However, before you do this, you need to set the correct values for cylinder-head-sector of first and last sectors in the FreeBSD partition, as well as the logical address of the first sector. First, take 3 bytes starting at address 0x01BF and copy them to 0x01CF. This takes care of CHS start, which is unchanged. Next, take 4 bytes at address 0x01C6 and copy them to 0x01D6. This is the logical sector start. The tricky bit is the CHS last sector value. If your two partitions were of identical size, then you can copy 3 bytes from 0x01C3 to 0x01D3. Otherwise, you'll need to calculate the new values by hand. If your NTFS partition was marked as active before, then set byte 0x01CE to be 0x80. One this is done, copy that second record over the first and zero-out the 16 bytes at 0x01CE. Use dd again to copy the updated mbr sector to your drive. At this point your master boot record will have the correct entry for your FreeBSD partition, which was moved over the NTFS one. See if you can mount /dev/ad0s1a while still in the livecd environment (actually, you will need to reboot first). If ad0s1a is under /dev and you can mount it, then your mbr is fine. Use growfs from here and then boot from the hard drive. As you can see, it's not a trivial thing to do, but it's possible if you are careful. Once again, I've never done this and am basing the whole thing on some of my previous experience in messing with the master boot record. There may be some other things that I missed. I also don't know if there is existing software that might make this whole process much easier, the directions here are a worst-case scenario for moving your partition by hand. - Max ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___
Re: Increasing partition size by removing partitions
I have a disk that is laid out with partion 0 being NTFS and 1 being FreeBSD. I want to remove the NTFS partition and grow the FreeBSD one but all the docs I have seen only talk about how to do this if the new part of the partition is at the end of the partition you wish to grow. How do I go about this? Partition Commander is aware of *BSD partitions and should be able to do this. (Granted it is payware.) Delete the NTFS partition, move the FreeBSD partition (slice in FreeBSD parlance) to the beginning of the drive, boot into FreeBSD to make sure everything is working, then go ahead with the grow operation as usual. As always, it's highly recommended to make a full backup first. Having done that, it may be easier to reslice the disk as FreeBSD only and then restore the backup. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Increasing partition size by removing partitions
On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 07:22:20PM -0400, Aryeh M. Friedman wrote: I have a disk that is laid out with partion 0 being NTFS and 1 being FreeBSD. I want to remove the NTFS partition and grow the FreeBSD one but all the docs I have seen only talk about how to do this if the new part of the partition is at the end of the partition you wish to grow. How do I go about this? For clarity, let's use the FreeBSD terminology and call these slices, one NTFS slice and one FreeBSD slice. Partitions are what go in the FreeBSD slice (your root, swap, var and usr aprtitions). Do you really need one big FreeBSD slice? You could remove the NTFS slice and create another FreeBSD slice in that place. To make things workable, be sure to have a standard FreeBSD boot manager in the MBR block by doing something like: # fdisk -B -b /boot/boot0 ad0 Then you can create a disklabel in the new slice holding one or more FreeBSD partitions. Next newfs them and add them to /etc/fstab and mount them. All these steps could be done from the Configure submenu of sysinstall if you're not familiar with the fdisk, bsdlabel and newfs commands. The very brave among us could copy the existing FreeBSD partitions from slice 2 to slice 1, enlarging them if needed and using fdisk and bsdlabel to combine the two slices into one, all depending on the size of the slices. The big issue here is to be aware not to overwrite anything before copying it into its final place. Regards, Paul Schenkeveld ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Increasing partition size by removing partitions
I have a disk that is laid out with partion 0 being NTFS and 1 being FreeBSD. I want to remove the NTFS partition and grow the FreeBSD one but all the docs I have seen only talk about how to do this if the new part of the partition is at the end of the partition you wish to grow. How do I go about this? ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Increasing partition size by removing partitions
On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 07:22:20PM -0400, Aryeh M. Friedman wrote: I have a disk that is laid out with partion 0 being NTFS and 1 being FreeBSD. I want to remove the NTFS partition and grow the FreeBSD one but all the docs I have seen only talk about how to do this if the new part of the partition is at the end of the partition you wish to grow. How do I go about this? There isn't a way to do this, as far as I know. -- | Jeremy Chadwickjdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB | ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Increasing partition size by removing partitions
On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Aryeh M. Friedman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have a disk that is laid out with partion 0 being NTFS and 1 being FreeBSD. I want to remove the NTFS partition and grow the FreeBSD one but all the docs I have seen only talk about how to do this if the new part of the partition is at the end of the partition you wish to grow. How do I go about this? Assuming that there is no (free) software that will do it for you, and you are unable for some reason to move the data to another place and repartition the drive, you have to manually move your FreeBSD partition back and then extend it. I've never done this before, but if I had to try it the first time I would do the following: 1. Try very hard to find some other hard drive where I can just dump the data and avoid this whole thing to begin with. :) 2. Boot from a FreeBSD livecd, attach a usb drive for storing some temporary files and mount it under /mnt. 3. Create a back-up of your master boot record (dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/mnt/mbr-backup bs=512 count=1). Assuming here that your drive is ad0. 4. Use fdisk to get the start and size values of your two partitions (in sectors). 5. Erase the ntfs partition (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0s1 bs=2m). 6. Copy your FreeBSD partition to the former start location of ntfs (dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/dev/ad0 bs=512 iseek=start of partition 2 oseek=start of partition 1 count=size of partition 2). Using bs=512 is slow, but it makes it easier for you to just take the numbers that fdisk gives you and plug them in. 7. Once this is done you will need to edit your mbr sector to overwrite the first partition entry with the second, but certain fields will need to be updated... I recommend you use a hex editor and work on the file that you saved in step 3. You can try the same thing with a partition editor, but you may not get the desired results. For the manual (and more fun) method, the partition table begins at offset 0x01BE, and each entry is 16 bytes long. That means that you need to copy 16 bytes starting at address 0x01CE to address 0x01BE. However, before you do this, you need to set the correct values for cylinder-head-sector of first and last sectors in the FreeBSD partition, as well as the logical address of the first sector. First, take 3 bytes starting at address 0x01BF and copy them to 0x01CF. This takes care of CHS start, which is unchanged. Next, take 4 bytes at address 0x01C6 and copy them to 0x01D6. This is the logical sector start. The tricky bit is the CHS last sector value. If your two partitions were of identical size, then you can copy 3 bytes from 0x01C3 to 0x01D3. Otherwise, you'll need to calculate the new values by hand. If your NTFS partition was marked as active before, then set byte 0x01CE to be 0x80. One this is done, copy that second record over the first and zero-out the 16 bytes at 0x01CE. Use dd again to copy the updated mbr sector to your drive. At this point your master boot record will have the correct entry for your FreeBSD partition, which was moved over the NTFS one. See if you can mount /dev/ad0s1a while still in the livecd environment (actually, you will need to reboot first). If ad0s1a is under /dev and you can mount it, then your mbr is fine. Use growfs from here and then boot from the hard drive. As you can see, it's not a trivial thing to do, but it's possible if you are careful. Once again, I've never done this and am basing the whole thing on some of my previous experience in messing with the master boot record. There may be some other things that I missed. I also don't know if there is existing software that might make this whole process much easier, the directions here are a worst-case scenario for moving your partition by hand. - Max ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
