Partition confusion

[Kurgan]

The weirdest thing happened. My hard drive (160 GB) is partitioned like so:

PC-BSD: 30 GB (I let the installer split that into three partitions, one for root, one for usr, and one for the swap file).
NTFS: 120 GB.

The NTFS portion was left blank and unformatted. I'd intended to go back later from within a Windows environment and work with it, but for the moment wanted to focus on the PC-BSD installation. The installation went off without a hitch. It "saw" the area I'd left for it to work with, and accepted my instructions to partition it as listed above. Everything was fine, and yes, I made sure the checkbox for using the entire drive was unchecked.

So, today I go and fire up Partition Magic, intending on shrinking the NTFS partition some, to give a little more to PC-BSD (I'd forgotten something that was going to require a lot of space to install). So, imagine my surprise when the program tells me the entire drive is partitions for PC-BSD! Partition Magic couldn't see the NTFS partition at all. I tried several other programs, including XP's Disk Manager, and everything's seeing it as 100% PC-BSD.

So I go into PC-BSD and look at the disk manager (or whatever it's called, --haven't got the terms down yet), and it sees the partitions as they're supposed to be (it doesn't show the unformatted NTFS portion, though). I'd been hoping the partion tools in PC-BSD would let me modify things, but that didn't work.

Does anyone understand what's going on here? I'm baffled. My goal is to simply resize the "usr" partition, adding another 20 GB or so, and then to have the balance as NTFS for general storage, but nothing outside of PC-BSD can see the partitions correctly, and the tools inside of PC-BSD don't see the unused space to let me make any changes (at least as far as I can tell). I'm stumped.

[dracheflieger]

I don't know if you have tried it or if it would help but gparted (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828) was what I originally used to set up all my partitions here.

[Kurgan]

Thanks. I'll give this a try. Just got it downloaded, so I'll go burn a disc and see what it says I can do.

[Kurgan]

Ok, that didn't work. Gparted also can't tell what file system it is, or see anything else. This is really weird. It only saw one partition:

"/dev/sda1" (flagged as Boot)
149.05 GB (160 GB drive)
File System: Unknown
Unable to detect file system.
First sector: 63
Last sector: 312575759
Total sectors: 312575697

What's supposed to be there is:

PC-BSD partitions: 30 GB
--root (9 GB)
--swap 1 GB
--usr (20 GB)

NTFS partition: everything else (120 GB)

Any partitioning software I've opened to look at the drive sees a single partition of about 150 GB. Partition Magic was the only one to actually say it was a PC-BSD partition, everything else says "unknown."

As I said above, PC-BSD's partition software (from within the OS) sees the appropriate 30 GBs, and the various segments (root/usr, etc). It doesn't seem to see the rest of the drive.

Any ideas? I may have to wipe the whole thing, partition it all over again, and re-install. At least, if I have to do that, I won't lose anything, since it's already a new installation. Still annoying, though. :)

[dracheflieger]

no more ideas from me...just keep in mind that PD-BSD will only install on a primary partition.

[Heyaxe]

My Theroy (Correct if wrong):=

The FreeBSD file system is not implemented in Windows and is why you get the "Unknown filesystem". And only PC-BSD will read the 30gb partiotn, meaning that the prikmary file system is a FreeBSD filesystem, thus making the Windows partition secondary.

I think...

Also be aware that you can only have 4 partitions per hd

[jdarnold]

Aye, you've run into a big problem that I have had with the installer. It just doesn't work correctly when it comes to disk partitions. I had the same thing happen to me, where it created a couple of partitions to use and the rest of the hard drive disappeared.

What option did you use when you installed? Pretty much any of them won't work quite like you want them to. I really want to see this part of the installation fixed up, as it can be a disaster, as I found out the hard way.

And it is particularly painful with FreeBSD partitions, because as far as I know, there is no partition software out there that will resize BSD partitions :-(

Your only recourse is to re-format the hard drive and start over. But to be honest, I've never had much luck getting PC-BSD to share a hard drive. Theoretically, you should be able to start with your initial set up (30gb UFS and 120gb NTFS) and carefully select the UFS partition (or even leave it unformatted) when you install, being sure to not click the "Use Entire Hard Drive" option. But it is a very weird and unpredictable process, one prone to error, as you've found out.

So start over. Use gparted to create 2 partitions, both NTFS. Then you should be able to select one for the PC-BSD install. Be careful how you proceed and let us know which options you selected and how you did it.

[antik]

And it is particularly painful with FreeBSD partitions, because as far as I know, there is no partition software out there that will resize BSD partitions :-(


growfs -- grow size of an existing ufs file system