I have been using FreeBSD (currently 4.10, yes yes i havent updated it for a few months), and unfortunately when initially installing it onto my laptop, i made the mistake of only assigning it 3.5 GB and time has passed and I now find myself withonly 300 something MB left on the chunk, i want to assign a lager partiotion to it, and do not know how to use "growfs" or know how safe it is. I was just wondering if I were to archive the "/" directory and ship it over to one of my Windows partition. After this destroying the current partition and creating a much larger one (preferabbly 8GB +) and then using any Live CD to dump this archive onto the new partition. Would this process work or would it merely act as data dumped on the HD as opposed to an OS. If anyone knows about this or any other ways that i may go about growing my partition for FreeBSD, without the tedious task of starting from scratch, i would be very thankful.
I use this on all my Windows boxes, Slackware Linux boxes. I've never had to use it yet with the *BSD machines.
You can use this to save your partition to an image file, even across the nework, which means your machine you plan to back up to must be running the partimaged server.
Then load this partimage Live-CD, and add the necessary IP info to the box after booting, which is usually just adding IP/subnet and gateway info (if needed).
Select the partition to backup, set options, and connect to the ip address of the server box.
It should only take a few minutes to copy the partition across the network. then you can resize the partition, and restore from the image.
Which would require booting once more on the Live-CD, adding the ip/subnet info, selecting the partition to restore, and the ip of the server and the directory where the partition was saved.
You will also need to download the program to install on the server box. Or run both boxes from the CD (not tested by myself.)
Also. you can just back up to a seperate partition on the same machine if you do not have a second box. if you have enough space on the Windows Partition, just backup to that drive.
It saves the backup as a image file.
I've been using this sucessfully for a few years now.
Look on the site for more info. This program works well.
Also contained on the Live-CD is a partition resizing tool. qt_parted which might be something you can use too, just to adjust the size of the partition without the image creation steps, which is really just used when backing up data. It is just like PowerQuests Partition Magic, except that PM costs and pated is free, Both tools are free.
Hey Locust, thanks a lot man. Both your description of how to go about it and the site that you recommended were very helpful. So as soon as I get those extra few GB free on my Windows partition I am gonna take an image of my bsd and get on with this process.
