Answer is correct. From myself.
Main Topics
Browse All Topicsi'm using FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE (latest freeNAS) booting from a USB drive. the storage is currently 4 drives of 1TB each in Raid 5 attached to an Areca ARC-1220 PCI-Express x8 SATA II Controller (~3TB usable). the controller supports 8 drives and Online RAID capacity expansion, so the plan is to add more 1TB drives as needed. I have recently added a fifth drive and increased the size of the raid to ~4TB, and now i need to resize the partition nondestructively (i.e. without loosing the data!). i am planing on following these instructions:
http://apps.sourceforge.ne
i was cautioned not to try to grow UFS file systems larger than 2TB (same link). is there anything in particular about large UFS that makes it unsafe to grow it? how likely is it that i'll be loosing my data if i go ahead and try this? although i have (almost) everything backed up, the perspective of having to fill up again the "new" drive if something goes wrong during growfs is not appealing.
This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.
Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.
If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.
Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.
Access the answers to your technology questions today.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.

Try it out and discover for yourself.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: gheistPosted on 2009-01-03 at 00:38:35ID: 23284423
Probably there are some shared data structure that has to be resized when growing over 2TB. /man.cgi?q uery=growf s&apropos= 0& sektion= 0&manpath= FreeBSD+7. 0-RELEASE& format=htm l
FreeBSD's 7.0 manual lists such cases: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi
I have no idea how to free up first cylinder group, probably some UFS editor is of help displaying files in there to be copied and deleted after to get first cylinder group free.
Sounds dangerous anyway. Google references do look scary. You may ask in FreeNAS and FreeBSD forums for instance - it is more likely there is somebody who went thru process.
All I have done ever was resizing 36GB(SCSI RAID-5) into 160GB(SATA mirror) by copying image (system down for long) and resizing up last data partition (fsck before cleaned dirty things, was clean after resize) - kind of as I read now in manual - got lucky with clean cylinder group...
You should go for umount at least, probably even reboot into PC-BSD or maintenance mode of FreeBSD 7.0 disc1 (handbook tells how to use this mode)
fsck while fs umounted is worth doing before resizing if you *EVER* switched server off during its lifetime.