Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:56:49 -0400 From: John Nielsen <lists@jnielsen.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Cc: Jeff Cross <jeff.cross@averageadmins.com> Subject: Re: Resizing Partitions, Losing Windows XP... Message-ID: <200609221456.50165.lists@jnielsen.net> In-Reply-To: <45142A20.5040601@averageadmins.com> References: <45142A20.5040601@averageadmins.com>
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On Friday 22 September 2006 14:23, Jeff Cross wrote: > I have been dual booting FreeBSD and Windows XP for quite sometime. > However, I never boot into Windows XP any longer. I can pretty much do > everything I need to do from within FreeBSD. Is there a way that I can > wipe out the Windows XP partition, resize the FreeBSD partition, and > install a standard FreeBSD MBR (no boot manager) without slicking and > reloading the hard drive? Probably several. See below. > I really like the way I have my stuff setup within FreeBSD and would > hate to have to recreate a lot of it as well as install applications > over again. Could I do a dump of my current FreeBSD partition, reformat > and partition the whole drive, install FreeBSD, and then restore my data > to the new partition or would this cause issues? Yes you could, and this is probably the recommended approach. Make sure you get a dump of each FreeBSD partition if you have more than one ( /, /usr, etc). You'll need to know how to use fdisk, bsdlabel, and newfs in order to create your new partitions from a FreeBSD install CD's rescue prompt. If you pass a -B flag to both fdisk and bsdlabel you should be fine as far as the MBR and boot blocks are concerned. Of course you'll also need to be able to access your dumps on whatever media or network location you put them on, and know how to use restore. Depending on how your disk is currently laid out, it might be possible to wipe out your windows partition and use growfs, but you really should have good backups before attempting this, so get a dump of everything in any case. JN
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