1 Topic by djmarcus

  • djmarcus
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Topic: Expanding Solaris x86 (64) 10 primary partition

Newbie to forum.

I'm running Solaris 10 (x86-64bit) on Dell PowerEdge 2900 (with SAS/SATA Raid 5 on LSI PERC5/i controller).

Performed default install of Solaris and didn't notice that it created a 4GB primary partition and a 286GB secondary.

Not surprisingly, the primary partition is full (secondary partition is still totally empty).

I want to expand the primary partition. Ideally I want it to fully subsume the secondary.

My questions: How can I expand the primary partition without reformatting and re-installing? [what tool(s) and steps to follow?]

-Many thanks in advance
David

2 Reply by class413

  • class413
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Re: Expanding Solaris x86 (64) 10 primary partition

I know that Solaris uses the same partition for root and swap.
I have no experience on Solaris at all, but I know that since version 10 the partition identifier is no longer the same as for Linux-swap.
There was a Solaris tool named "growfs", at least for Solaris 9, so I think it must exist a similar tool for 10 too.

Some related links:
http://paulf.free.fr/pfdisk.html
http://paulf.free.fr/solarisx86_growfs.html

But in the following link I found that there are real problems to grow the root.
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?t … ID=9834704

If Solaris doesn't mount the logical partitions in the extended partition, you can shrink them with Gparted, but I'm not at all sure that you can grow the Solaris partition.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

3 Reply by djmarcus

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Re: Expanding Solaris x86 (64) 10 primary partition

Your feedback is realy helpful. You seem to confirm what I've been able to infer that growing the root partition is not really possible in Solaris 10.  For the moment, I've moved files to my secondary disk and symbolically linked them. Things seem to work, but I'm not entirely happy with this approach.

-Thanks
David

4 Reply by class413

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Re: Expanding Solaris x86 (64) 10 primary partition

I agree, that is not at all happy. I even read about a new filesystem, zfs, supposed to be advantageous for Solaris, but obviously unsupported by parted.

I think you could try to find dedicated Solaris forums. There is a Solaris sub-forum in the "linuxquestions.org" forum, but related info concerned Solaris 9.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***