SUMMARY: Non-destructive repartitioning

From: chiem@azc.com
Date: Fri Aug 29 1997 - 11:39:41 CDT


My original question:

One of the machines here is constantly running out of swap space. The swap
partition on that machine is on the boot disk. Would it be possible to
repartition the boot disk so that I move more free space from the '/'
filesystem to my swap partition '/tmp' without destroying the data on it,
and thus requiring a reinstallation?

I know adding swap space can be done via creating a swap file, but that doesn't
seem like a safe/elegant way to go.

---

Summary:

It is not possible to shrink a UFS partition, but growing one is possible. In order to repartition, I'd have to boot off a different drive, like the cdrom, do a level 0 dump of the root partition, repartition, and then restore the dump.

Adding swap space can be done via a swap file.

mkfile xxm /your/swapfile swap -a /your/swapfile

Add to /etc/vfstab.

About half of you out there state that this solution is safe, while the other half think that it is unsafe. Performance of a swapfile should be about 1% less than that of a swap partition.

Thanks!

Responses from:

kevin@uniq.com.au rsk@rsk.itw.com James.Ashton@anu.edu.au Hill.Michael@tci.com orr@eccs.com phil@philco.libs.uga.edu john@starinc.com cmconwa@sandia.gov matthew.stier@tddny.fujitsu.com foster@bial1.ucsd.edu trento@net.iaiver.com.mx reynolmd@helios.aston.ac.uk



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