My Partition Resizing Exercise
The other day I needed to install a non-Solaris operating system onto my Ultra 40 M2. But I still wanted Solaris and/or Nevada as my primary operating system. Even though there are a bunch of virtualization technologies out there including the newly aquired VirtualBox, I wanted to run the operating system on the "iron" as they say.
The only problem, I had allocated 100% of all my disks to Solaris. I needed to decrease the fdisk partition on a couple of disks to make space to install other operating systems on. My disk layout was roughly
c1t0d0s0 - boot environment #1 root (ufs) c1t0d0s1 - boot environment #1 swap c1t1d0s0 - boot environment #2 root (ufs) c1t1d0s1 - boot environment #2 swap
And then a ZFS pool
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
storage ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t0d0s7 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t1d0s7 ONLINE 0 0 0
My thought was that since c1t0d0 and c1t1d0 were only partially allocated to the zpool (and the boot disks), that I would target those for repartitioning. Which meant, first step was to rebuild the zpool without them. I didn't really need them for more space in the zpool anyways.
First step, to break the mirror, on the partial space. This would allow me to make a "backup" of the pool while I rebuild it.
zfs detach c1t1d0s7 zpool create dataz c1t1d0s7 zfs snapshot -r storage@migration zfs send -R storage@migration > /dataz/storage.zfs
Now, destroy and recreate the main pool without the partial devices, and restore the data
zpool destroy storage zpool create storage mirror c1t2d0 c1t3d0 zfs receive -Fd storage < /dataz/storage.zfs
Easy enough. My pool no longer has the partial disks
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
Now onto resizing the target disks. The goal was to do this without doing a reinstall at all. I have been using Live Upgrade for a while to continually keep my system up to date with Nevada/SXDE releases, so I figured I could use Live Upgrade while resizing the fdisk partitions to accomplish this.
Boot Environment Is Active Active Can Copy Name Complete Now On Reboot Delete Status -------------------------- -------- ------ --------- ------ ---------- sol-nv-87 yes yes yes no - sol-nv-85 yes no no yes -
So, first disk. First step remove the LU Boot Environment
ludelete sol-nv-85
Now, since nothing is using the disk, format and fdisk aren't going to complain. So, first thing, use fdisk to reduce the size of the Solaris partition. I just reduced it to 90% of the disk
fdisk c1t1d0p0
Total disk size is 36472 cylinders
Cylinder size is 16065 (512 byte) blocks
Cylinders
Partition Status Type Start End Length %
========= ====== ============ ===== === ====== ===
1 Solaris 1 32824 32824 90
And then recreated the Solaris layout with format
Current partition table (original): Total disk cylinders available: 32822 + 2 (reserved cylinders) Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks 0 root wm 132 - 1437 10.00GB (1306/0/0) 20980890 1 swap wu 1 - 131 1.00GB (131/0/0) 2104515 2 backup wu 0 - 32821 251.43GB (32822/0/0) 527285430 3 unassigned wu 0 0 (0/0/0) 0 4 unassigned wu 0 0 (0/0/0) 0 5 unassigned wu 0 0 (0/0/0) 0 6 unassigned wu 0 0 (0/0/0) 0 7 home wm 1438 - 32821 240.41GB (31384/0/0) 504183960 8 boot wu 0 - 0 7.84MB (1/0/0) 16065 9 unassigned wu 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
And finally, recreate the Boot Environment. I just made the new Boot Environment a copy of the current Boot Envionment, which happens to be Nevada/SXDE Build 87
lucreate -m /:/dev/dsk/c1t1d0s0:ufs -m -:/dev/dsk/c1t1d0s1:swap -n sol-nv-87-copy
And activate it and boot into it
luactivate sol-nv-87-copy init 6
All pretty straight forward so far. Now here comes what ends up being the sticky part. You would think that since I was booted into the new Boot Environment, that I could delete the old Boot Environment, and do to the same thing, but...
ludelete sol-nv-87 The boot environmentcontains the GRUB menu. Attempting to relocate the GRUB menu. ERROR: No suitable candidate slice for GRUB menu on boot disk: INFORMATION: You will need to create a new Live Upgrade boot environment on the boot disk to find a new candidate for the GRUB menu. ERROR: Cannot relocate the GRUB menu in boot environment . ERROR: Cannot delete boot environment . Unable to delete boot environment.
That's what I was afraid of. The GRUB boot menu is sitting on the disk still. I searched around but could not find any way to move it. I found Slava Leanovich's blog entry which included instructions for moving the GRUB menu, and even though I tried that, ludelete still complained.
Well, gulp, here goes nothing. I decided to try to trick Solaris and not tell it I messed with the Boot Environment. First I made a ufsdump of root on that disk
ufsdump 0f /extra/holding/root.dump /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0
Now with everything backed up from the disk, a big leap of faith. I went into fdisk and resized the Solaris parition as just before.
And then into format to recreate the disk layout. Of course this time I get the warnings
format c1t0d0 selecting c1t0d0 [disk formatted] /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0 is in use for live upgrade /. Please see ludelete(1M). /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1 is in use for live upgrade -. Please see ludelete(1M).
Yeah, You might think so Solaris. I move along and setup the layout.
Then, ufsrestore the data
newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s0 mount /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s0 /mnt cd /mnt ufsrestore rf /extra/holding/root.dump
Sensing that this might not be enough, I decide to do a comple of things. First, reinstall GRUB manually, as described in Slava's entry
installgrub /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s0 stage1 written to partition 2 sector 0 stage2 written to partition 2, 235 sectors starting at 50
And then, just for grins, update this Boot Environment to the New Boot Environment I created just a little while earlier. I figured this should ensure that anything possible that I missed with ufsdump would be restored correctly
lumake -n sol-nv-87
Well, lumake returned success at least. Here goes nothing. Lets activate the Boot Environment and cross our fingers
luactivate sol-nv-87 init 6
Tah-Dah! Yet another reason why I love Solaris. You flex it in weird ways and it responds logically.