decreasing partition size

[mikeboz]

I want to steal some gigs from partion 'OLD' to create partion 'NEW'.
My question is:

What happens to data on partition 'OLD' after I change its size w/
format -> partion -> 'OLD'?

Enter partition size[26216064b, 26008c, 12800.81mb, 12.5gb]: 8gb

Currently 'OLD' partion only contains 1.3gb of data.

Thanks,

Mikeb

 

[mikeclark]

If you change partitians with format you lose data (backup before and restore after )
After changine the partitians you will have to run newfs on the partitian to create a filesystem, which will create clean filesystem then restore the data.

 

[Jimbo2112]

My understanding of the situation is that you cannot retain any data in a parition that has it's size changed. Like you say ..... you *must* save and then restore afterwards to the new partition size. If there is a way of changing the partition size without data loss then I would be interested to know how, as it would be quite handy!!

Cheers

Jimbo

 

[cfsalmeida]

Without any "special" software like Veritas Volume Manager, is no possible to shrink a filesystem without a backup -> change partition -> restore, but you can expand a ufs filesystem by change the partition (space must be contigous), and then use " /usr/lib/fs/ufs/mkfs" with undocumented flag -G, this can also be done with the filesystem mounted if you use the -M flag.

Regards,

Carlos Almeida,

 

[KenCunningham]

You can also use growfs if you have Disksuite available. I have used this sucessfully in the past, even on the root partition (a mistake of mine, and I wouldn't recommend it. Fortunately, like Basil Fawlty, I think I got away with it!). Unfortunately you can't shrink a filesystem the same way. Read up on Disksuite at

http://www.docs.sun.com.

Cheers.