Growfs on /

[snapshot]

I need to "grow" /. I know that I can't run a growfs on / as it is mounted but if I was to boot from CD would / be mounted (I don't think so) in which case could I successfully run growfs ?

 

[Annihilannic]

Before running growfs you will need to increase the size of the slice it is sitting on, have you done that?

Usually that would be difficult for the / filesystem because it either already occupies all of the disk, or it has other filesystems after it on the disk.

You can move the other filesystems around, but it's manual and fiddly.

Annihilannic.

 

[snapshot]

Thanks Annihilannic

Yes I've done that, it's mirrored so I grew my slice on one mirror, then the other, that all went OK but I hadn't realised (or read the man page properly) that I couldn't growfs root. hence the question about booting from CD to do so!

 

[Annihilannic]

I wasn't aware that you couldn't growfs root either... what's the error message?

In that case doing it from CD should be fine.

Annihilannic.

 

[snapshot]

Error message? you don't get an error message! No, it justs locks root so you can't write anything to it and that's that! Had to reboot to get out of it. You can't growfs on /usr either!

 

[coffeysm]

How are your partitions layed out? Just about everything on / is linked to another area. My / slice is usually only about < 100MB total.... You could break your mirror and re-partition the secondary disk and then run ufsdumps onto the new drive partitions...that should work for you.

 

[tuka]

The growfs's command write locks the mounted filesystem , which the time can be adjusted. See the man pages for growfs.
This is probably the reason growing root is not a workable
solution.

 

[KenCunningham]

Strangely, and possibly fortunately, it worked for me and I got away with it. Like snapshot, I missed it in the docs. Perhaps they should include something to check whether you're trying to growfs / and issue a warning or better still, refuse to proceed.