Re: Moving paritions around

John Levine wrote:
I set up my laptop to dual boot between W1nd@ws and FreeBSD. When I
first set it up I made the partitions the same size, but since then I
found I do a lot more with FreeBSD so I'd rather give it more space.

So the last time I had to reinstall Windows from scratch, I made its
partition smaller. Now there's a big chunk of free space between
the two partitions. Should I expect the following to work?

(back everything up, duh)

Boot from a CD, change the partition table to make the FreeBSD partition
start right after the Windows partition

Use dd to move down the existing FreeBSD partition data so it starts
at the beginning of the new partition

Use growfs to give the extra space to my /usr filesystem, which is at
the end of the existing partition

Or should I just back it all up to a USB disk, reformat, and restore it,
which will take considerably longer?

R's,
John

It's like a sorting programming problem. In order to move objects of
similar sizes between 2 locations, you need 3 locations total : 1
destination, 1 target, and 1 temporary.

Similar ideologies apply here. You need to a) dump(3) the data from your
FreeBSD disk into a safe spot, and b) copy over all of your Windows
files into (another?) safe spot, then, c) install XP over from scratch
with the new scheme, and d) boot using a freebsd snapshot iso, copy all
of your files over again by "un-dump(3)'ing" them, and modify /etc/fstab
accordingly.

Cheers,
-Garrett
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