I have an old FreeBSD Server (running 7.3-RELEASE) that desperately needs additional storage. In fact, it has some-- the original 20G SCSI drives have been replaced by 300G SCSI drives, so in theory there is 280G available that could be used.
I'd like to make use of this space. I think the best way to do this is by formatting the unused space as a new slice on the existing drive, but I'm not clear how to do this without destroying the data on the existing slice. Most of the documentation I can find about doing this refers to initial installation. I know how to set up slices and partitions during initial installation, but not how to claim unused space on the drive AFTER initial installation.
(I'd also be happy to expand the slice and add additional partitions to the existing slice, but I've heard that this is riskier).
I thought the easy way to do this might be to use /stand/sysinstall
, but when I go into either Configure -> FDisk or Configure -> Label, I get this message:
No disks found! Please verify that your disk controller is being
properly probed at boot time. See the Hardware Guide on the
Documentation menu for clues on diagnosing this type of problem.
This is obviously untrue, since I'm actually running off of a disk when I get this message, but maybe sysinstall just doesn't like messing with the boot disk?
Output of fdisk da0
:
******* Working on device /dev/da0 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=2235 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)
Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=2235 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)
Media sector size is 512
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
start 63, size 35905212 (17531 Meg), flag 80 (active)
beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
end: cyl 1023/ head 254/ sector 63
The data for partition 2 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
<UNUSED>
Output of bsdlabel da0s1
# /dev/da0s1:
8 partitions:
# size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
a: 2097152 0 4.2BSD 2048 16384 89
b: 2097152 2097152 swap
c: 35905212 0 unused 0 0 # "raw" part, don't edit
e: 2097152 4194304 4.2BSD 2048 16384 89
f: 29613756 6291456 4.2BSD 2048 16384 89
Update:
I came a cross the advice to use sade for this purpose. Unfortunately, sade can't see much empty space:
0 63 62 - 12 unused 0
63 35905212 35905274 da0s1 8 freebsd 165
35905275 10501 35915775 - 12 unused 0
This may be a dead end. Do I need to figure out drive geometry somehow? It might be relevant to mention that the drive is a RAID 1 mirror set; originally the mirrored drives were both 20G SCSI drives but they've both been swapped out with 300G drives. I'm willing to temporarily break the mirror if that will help.