technossomy

I am looking to increase the var partition on a FreeBSD 6.3 installation, but am encountering this alert message:

"One or more partitions from this disk are mounted, there the partition layout cannot be altered.
Unmount the particular partitions first or use a bootable CD-ROM operating system to partition this disk if this is a system partition that cannot be unmounted (eg / or /dev)"

I understand this to mean that only an alternative kernel is authorised to repartition. Does this message mean that I should be using a live CD and if so, will also Linux do? Does this also mean that only partitions can be edited which do not contain system files?

greimer

Although your errors message refers only to "some partitions" being mounted, I suspect that the one really causing the problem is /var itself. I would not expect that you'd be able to alter the partition size of a partition that is mounted.

If your disk has spare, unused partitions, paehaps you can mount up an empty one someplace, copy the existing /var into it, change your /etc/fstab (or equivalent?) to mount this new partition as /var, and reboot. Then the "real" /var will not be mounted, and you may be able to alter the partition size.

if there are no free partitions, maybe you can insert a 2nd disk and use a partition on it for a temporary /var.