Growing a UFS filesystem past 1 TB.
We have a 750 Gig SAN Volume that we created under Solaris 8. We gave newfs no additional options when creating this filesystem. We've now upgraded to Solaris 10, and we wish to grow this Volume to 1.2 TB.
Our SAN easily (and immediately) lets us do this, as long as no system is accessing the volume. Once the Volume's size has been increase, we run format and let it attempt to auto-configure the type of the existing SAN Volume. I've tried that recently but I only came up with errors when attempting to expand the filesystem.
/usr/lib/fs/mkfs -G /dev/rdsk/c5t3d0s0 1992203200
Warning: 2087 sector(s) in last cylinder unallocated
Not enough free space
Filesystem is currently inconsistent. It must be repaired with fsck (1M) before being used. Use following command todothis:
fsck /dev/rdsk/c5t3d0s0
One problem should be reported, that the summary information is bad. You will then be askedif it should be salvaged. Answer'yes' tothis quiestion.
Now you might be asking, why then aren't you running fsck on this filesystem... Well, you see there is this bug, and we're still affected by it. See Bug IDs # 2143031 & 6477410. Until we get a patch that fixes our fsck issue, we'll be stuck at 750 Gigs; however what I'm trying to do is get a better idea if and how we can grow from 750 GB to 1.2 TB, as well if this operation will require us to migrate to an EFI disk label.
Growing UFS filesystems has worked in the past (in Solaris 8 no less), however we weren't growing past the 1 TB mark. We've been able to successfully grow a UFS filesystem using growfs (or mkfs -G) without needing to use SDS metadevices.
Unfortunately, most of the documentation available on-line will show growfs being used to expand metadevices past 1 TB. Just to reiterate, I do not wish to employ SDS (or ZFS) to expand this filesystem, our SAN lets us do this with out having to rely on SDS.
Based on some of the Sun Documentation, I believe that UFS will support filesystems larger than 1 TB (16 TB Max), however, in order to support a single disk that is larger than 1 TB in size, I'm under the impression that I'll need to re-create my disk with a new EFI disk label as opposed to the traditional VTOC label. Is that a correct assumption? If my impression is incorrect, is it possible to grow a filesystem using format & growfs / mkfs from 750 Gigs to 1.2 TB?
If I have to convert to using an EFI disk label, is there anyway to convert a disk with an existing VTOC table to a new EFI label without loosing any data or having to copy it back from a backup?
How can ZFS help me get past these limitations and grow my filesystem? Will it be necessary
for me to create a partition table on the disk in question, and if so, will I have to use an EFI label or will a VTOC label work just as well? How does ZFS behave if the size of the disk it is on is increased?
Sorry to bombard you all with so much questions. Any ideas, suggestions, and help would be appreciated.
TIA,
--Raf
