Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 05:05:59 -0700 (PDT) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: =?iso-8859-1?q?Oliver=20Humpage?= <suzt_78@yahoo.co.uk> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, oliver@watershed.co.uk Subject: Re: formatting 'unused space' Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10207290459240.16844-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <20020729081926.23979.qmail@web13901.mail.yahoo.com>
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On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, Oliver Humpage wrote: > > Sorry, this is an embarrassingly newbie question... > > A 20GB disk in my mail server was about to die, so I > did an emergency dd(1) of its contents over to a new > 40GB drive. So now, on the new drive, I have a 20GB > partition (with /, /usr and /var on it), and 20GB of > "unused" space. > > Is it possible to fdisk (and presumably disklabel) > this spare 20GB? I don't want to do anything fancy > with it, just to have it mounted as /spare_space or > similar. And since this is our main mail server, I > don't really want to wipe the whole disk and restore > from tape... > > I couldn't tell from `man fdisk` whether you can > format one partition without wiping the whole drive. > Can you in fact just ask for the unused space to be > "FreeBSD" in sysinstall, and it won't touch your other > partitions? Or if fdisk won't do it, is there anything > that can? > Yes, you can create a slice (dos partition) in what space, subject to the limitation of four slices per drive. You can then make up to eight partitions on the slice for different file systems. You could create a /usr/local file system; or a /usr/ports; and/or a /usr/obj; or move tmp there will a symlink; or just stash stuff like old kernels or isos. Often people make /home a separate partition. If you're careful and don't delete what exists, you should not have any trouble overwriting what's already on the disk. Annelise -- Annelise Anderson Author of: FreeBSD: An Open-Source Operating System for Your PC Available from: BSDmall.com and amazon.com Book Website: http://www.bittreepress.com/FreeBSD/introbook/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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