Kids… DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! If this is not done exactly right, you will render your system unbootable and corrupt your data. That being said, under some circumstances you can take some space from your swap partition and add it to an unused one without initializing your entire disk. This is particularly useful if you decide you want to use DiskSuite to mirror your system disk, but have not allocated the 100MB partition that is needed to hold the state databases. As always, BACK EVERYTHING UP FIRST. Better yet, make two backups and store them on two different systems. This is a risky procedure, and you don’t want to lose any data!
You can also use my instructions for copying a Solaris boot drive to a disk with a different partition layout as a safer alternative.
The first thing you need to do is figure out if your disk layout will allow for this procedure. Usually the swap partition is the second one on the disk, making it partition number 1 (Partition number 0 is root). If partition number 1 is swap on your system, and partition number 3 or 4 are unused, you are in good shape, and this should work. To figure this out, you should do something like this:
# format
Select the boot disk - usually disk 0
Specify disk (enter its number): 0
format> partition
format> print
This will show you the current disk layout.
Current partition table (original):
Total disk cylinders available: 24620 + 2 (reserved cylinders)
Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 root wm 0 - 725 1.00GB (726/0/0) 2097414
1 swap wu 726 - 9436 11.90GB (8635/0/0) 24946515
2 backup wm 0 - 24619 33.92GB (24620/0/0) 71127180
3 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
4 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
5 usr wm 9437 - 10888 2.00GB (1452/0/0) 4194828
6 var wm 10889 - 18148 10.00GB (7260/0/0) 20974140
7 unassigned wm 18149 - 24619 8.91GB (6471/0/0) 18694719
Here we see that partitions 3 and 4 are unused and directly after partition 1, so we can take some space from swap and assign it to one of these. Partition 2 is, of course the entire disk. I have not tried it, so I don’t know if you could assign non-sequential cylinders to a partition that is not directly after swap.
So to take some space from partition 1 and add it to partition 3, the first thing we have to do is disable swap, so the format utility will let us change it.
Comment out the following lines in your /etc/vfstab file and reboot the system.
#/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1 - - swap - no -
#swap - /tmp tmpfs - yes -
This will bring the system up without swap enabled. You can now edit the disk label. Remember that our cylinders need to be sequential, so always work in cylinders when using the format utility.
Re-enter the format utility, select your system disk and view the partition table:
# format
Select the boot disk - usually disk 0
Specify disk (enter its number): 0
format> partition
format> print
Again we wee that partitions 3 and 4 are unused.
Current partition table (original):
Total disk cylinders available: 24620 + 2 (reserved cylinders)
Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 root wm 0 - 725 1.00GB (726/0/0) 2097414
1 swap wu 726 - 9436 11.90GB (8635/0/0) 24946515
2 backup wm 0 - 24619 33.92GB (24620/0/0) 71127180
3 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
4 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
5 usr wm 9437 - 10888 2.00GB (1452/0/0) 4194828
6 var wm 10889 - 18148 10.00GB (7260/0/0) 20974140
7 unassigned wm 18149 - 24619 8.91GB (6471/0/0) 18694719
The first thing we need to do is take some cylinders away from partition 1. In this example, we are looking to make partition 3 roughly 100MB, so we need to take about 75 cylinders from partition 1 so that we can add it to partition 3. Parititon 1 ends at cylinder 9436, so we need to subtract 75 from that number. 9436 - 75 = 9361, so that is the new ending cylinder for partition 1. We then subtract the beginning cylinder (726) from that number to give us the new total number of cylinders for partition 1. 9361 - 726 = 8635, so this is the number we enter when format asks for the size of the partition. Like so:
partition> 1
Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
1 swap wu 726 - 9360 11.90GB (8635/0/0) 24946515
Enter partition id tag[swap]:
Enter partition permission flags[wu]:
Enter new starting cyl[726]:
Enter partition size[24946615b, 9436c, 12880.92mb, 12.00gb]: 8635c
partition>
Now we have to add these 75 cylinders to partition 3.
partition> 3
Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
3 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
Enter partition id tag[unassigned]:
Enter partition permission flags[wm]:
Enter new starting cyl[0]:9361
Enter partition size[0b, 0c, 0.00mb, 0.00gb]:75c
partition>
Print out the new partition table to make sure everything lines up correctly:
partition> print
Current partition table (original):
Total disk cylinders available: 24620 + 2 (reserved cylinders)
Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 root wm 0 - 725 1.00GB (726/0/0) 2097414
1 swap wu 726 - 9360 11.90GB (8635/0/0) 24946515
2 backup wm 0 - 24619 33.92GB (24620/0/0) 71127180
3 unassigned wm 9361 - 9436 107.21MB (76/0/0) 219564
4 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
5 usr wm 9437 - 10888 2.00GB (1452/0/0) 4194828
6 var wm 10889 - 18148 10.00GB (7260/0/0) 20974140
7 unassigned wm 18149 - 24619 8.91GB (6471/0/0) 18694719
Partition 1 ends at cylinder 9360, and partition 3 picks right up at cylinder 9361. Partition 3 ends at cylinder 9436, and partition 5 begins at cylinder 9437. Partition 4, of course, remains unused. Since none of the cylinders overlap, we can go ahead and write the disk label out. DO NOT DO THIS if you have any doubt at all about what you have just done. By writing out the disk label, you could corrupt the data on your formated filesystems if any cylinders overlap into them. The format utility is usually pretty smart about keeping you from making mistakes, but be very careful anyway! You don’t want to end up with scrambled eggs on a disk that has valuable data on it.
partition> label
This writes out the disk label, so you can now exit the format utility and re-enable swap in your /etc/vfstab file. Simply uncomment out the following two lines and reboot the system.
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1 - - swap - no -
swap - /tmp tmpfs - yes -
Reboot your system, and if all goes well, it will come up, and you will see that partition 3 will have a little over 100MB on it. Usually people want to do this so they can store the DiskSuite meta database on the newly created partition. If this is the case for you, you can now move on to mirroring the system disk.
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What’s with all the rebooting? This ain’t windows
Rather then editing your vfstab to comment out swap and then rebooting, you should just run:
swap -d
This will disable swap and allow you to modify it’s slice size.
Then you can run format and re-partition your disk.
After you’re done editing swap’s slice size, run:
swap -a
This will re-enable swap on your newly resized swap slice.
Substituting in these steps will allow you to perform your operation without the two reboots.