Recently, the FreeBSD virtual machine that hosts my internal wiki got low on space. I had not provisioned a large enough virtual hard drive when creating the VM. When you want to store all the things in the wiki, you will need all the space. So, I will guide you through the steps for increasing the MBR partition size in FreeBSD.

First things first: Backup the important data

Second: Backup the important data

Now that you’ve got your data backed up, lets have a look at our current drive usage. This can be done using the following command:

df -Ph
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/da0s1a    120G     27G     84G    24%    /
devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev

Because I didn’t know I was going to blog this, my drive already has enough space. But because I’m greedy, and want to educate others, I will resize the drive to 256GB.

Let have a look at our current hard drive partitions. You can do this using gpart:

gpart show
=>       63  268435393  da0  MBR  (128G)
         63       1985       - free -  (993K)
       2048  268433408    1  freebsd  [active]  (128G)

=>        0  268433408  da0s1  BSD  (128G)
          0  260046848      1  freebsd-ufs  (124G)
  260046848    8386560      2  freebsd-swap  (4.0G)

I powered off my VM and provisioned more drive storage. Powered it up again and ran the above command a second time. You can see the newly acquired free space.

=>       63  536870849  da0  MBR  (256G)
         63       1985       - free -  (993K)
       2048  268433408    1  freebsd  [active]  (128G)
  268435456  268435456       - free -  (128G)

=>        0  268433408  da0s1  BSD  (128G)
          0  260046848      1  freebsd-ufs  (124G)
  260046848    8386560      2  freebsd-swap  (4.0G)

Before resizing a partition we are required to get rid of the swap partition. First of all disable swap with the following command:

sudo swapoff -all
swapoff: removing
/dev/da0s1b as swap device

We can now delete the swap partition. Ensure the index matches the index of the swap-partiton and the drive identifier corresponds with the correct drive in the BSD section.

sudo gpart delete -i 2 da0s1

Before we can use the free space we need resize the MBR section.

sudo gpart resize -i 1 da0

Confirm the freespace has moved to BSD using gpart.

gpart show
=>       63  536870849  da0  MBR  (256G)
         63       1985       - free -  (993K)
       2048  536868864    1  freebsd  [active]  (256G)

=>        0  536868864  da0s1  BSD  (256G)
          0  260046848      1  freebsd-ufs  (124G)
  260046848  276822016         - free -  (132G)

You will also see the swap partition is gone.

Now we want to resize the hard drive – be sure to leave enough create a new swap partition.

sudo gpart resize -i 1 -s 252G -a 4k da0s1

That will leave me with 4GB to create a swap drive which can be done with the following command:

sudo gpart add -t freebsd-swap -a 4k da0s1

Check that the partitions have been resized and created using gpart:

gpart show da0s1
=>        0  536868864  da0s1  BSD  (256G)
          0  528482304      1  freebsd-ufs  (252G)
  528482304    8386560      2  freebsd-swap  (4.0G)

Now we need to enable the swap drive and grow the file system to fit the new partition. This can be done with the following commands:

sudo swapon -a
sudo growfs /

You will need to confirm that you wish the resize the partition. Did you remember to make a backup?

Device is mounted read-write; resizing will result in temporary write suspension for /. It's strongly recommended to make a backup before growing the file system. OK to grow filesystem on /dev/da0s1a, mounted on /, from 124GB to 252GB? [yes/no]

We can check our partitions again with gpart:

gparts show
=>       63  536870849  da0  MBR  (256G)
         63       1985       - free -  (993K)
       2048  536868864    1  freebsd  [active]  (256G)

=>        0  536868864  da0s1  BSD  (256G)
          0  528482304      1  freebsd-ufs  (252G)
  528482304    8386560      2  freebsd-swap  (4.0G)

If everything looks good, we can then check our hard drive usage with the following command.

df -Ph
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/da0s1a    244G     27G    198G    12%    /
devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev

And there is it – You have now resized your partitions and can store all the files the way data hoarders intended.