Hello, I'm a fairly inexperienced FreeBSD user, and I have a problem. I was running (arch) linux before I installed FreeBSD on a small leftover section of my hard drive. I've gotten it running, and I'm happy with it, but my /usr partition is filling up quickly. I want to wipe the old partition which had arch on it, and mount it as the /usr/local partition, copying all of the data from the old /usr/local onto it. However, I don't know exactly how to do this, and I don't see it in the handbook. I tried running sysinstall and fdisking the arch partition and making it FreeBSD, and then making it the /local slice with disklabel (just to get it working, first of all), but this hasn't been working. Can anyone help me?

Thanks

I would recommend using Partition Magic, I use it whenever I have partitioning problems and believe me I've dealt with some of the most vexing ones. If you want a free solution try Ranish Partition Manager. Here's a link to the latest stable version (they also have betas, but use them at your own risk): http://www.ranish.com/part/part240.zip

Okay,

Where is /arch located? /dev/ad0s1 or /dev/ad1s0 or something.

I assume that it is linux and is located on a primary partition? I could be wrong.

But find where the partition is located according to BSD. Then do a disklabel /dev/ad0s1 and create a bsd slice. Just use the whole partition. Then newfs /dev/ad0s1a.

You are going to want to read the man pages for disklabel and newfs if you want anything more than just a vanilla format. And make sure you have the correct partition. Try to mount it to check it first.

If you need some pointers on finding it (I assume you know where it is but maybe you don't) I can try and help. Or you can load linux and not the device name... then use that to tell you where it is under BSD.

edit:

I assume you have one IDE hard drive.

If you could just do a `fdisk /dev/ad0` and post the output here.
Then do a `bsdlabel /dev/ad0s1` Or s2,s3,s4... whatever slices you have made. That would be enough information for me to give you more detailed steps.

Thanks, but I think I'll stick to my Morphix install for the moment.

I just read your comment about /stand/sysinstall not working. Did you press "w" after you had made changes? To write them out? You don't do that during an install so you can go back before committing yourself to the changes... but here you want to write it out. Press "w" on both screens after you have made the changes you want. It will work. Then you just need to add it to /etc/fstab

Are you referring to my post in the Debian forum "internet broke"?

Craigwd,

Nope, I am referring to this thread... and this original poster. I have no idea what you are talking about. I don't traditionally read the [linux] distribution specific areas of this board because I don't have any on hand.

never mind, the problem is solved. For some reason, FreeBSD does not accept

#mount local/

but accepts

#mount /local/

even though I am in the root directory in both cases. I had used the W command, in response to your question, frob. Thank you both for your help.