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Topic: Expanding FreeBSD partitions ?

Stupid question, since I can already guess what the answer is...

I have a 1TB drive that I use for making backups that's currently partitioned (using GPT) into about 7 partitions... six little ones followed one big one, in that order.  All of the partitions are formatted as FreeBSD UFS partitions with SoftUpdates and Journaling enabled (although I guess that I can turn these features off on a per-partition basis, if necessary, before proceeding).  What I want to do is to use gparted to just delete the first six partitions and then expand that final seventh partition so that it will end up using all available space on the whole drive.  So the question is:  Can I do this successfully using gparted?  Can gparted both move the start of, and expand, an existing FreeBSD UFS partition, while preserving all of the existing directories, files, etc.?

If it can't, no big deal.  It just means that I'll have to totally de-partition the drive create the one big partition I want to end up with fresh, and then spend several hours re-backing-up all of the data in the one big partition.

My guess is that somebody is just going to tell me "Sure!  Gparted can do that!"  But I'm just worried that some small and subtle thing will go awry.

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Re: Expanding FreeBSD partitions ?

According to the latest "Features" table, GParted can detect, move or copy a ufs filesystem, but not grow or shrink it.

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

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Re: Expanding FreeBSD partitions ?

OK.  Thanks.  I was hoping to shorthcut this a bit, but it appears that on this occasion I'll need to take the long way home, i.e. repartition the drive, do a fresh newfs,  and then make my backup from srcratch.  (Indeed, that's already in progress.)

No big deal either way.  I was just wondering if I could be clever and save myself some wall-clock time.

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Re: Expanding FreeBSD partitions ?

GParted includes free open source tools for its features. Most of the times problems aren't technical but legal ones.
I'm not experienced on ufs myself.
Please look at this thread, concerning ufs support by GParted (and Debian).

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