How to Expand a Soft Partition

When no other logical volumes have been built on a soft partition, you can add space to the soft partition. Free space is located and used to extend the partition. Existing data is not moved.

If a soft partition has been used to create another volume (for example, if it is a component of a RAID-0 volume), the soft partition cannot be expanded. In most cases, the same objective (providing more space for the device that contains the soft partition) can be achieved by concatenating other volumes onto the containing device. See Expanding Storage Capacity for more information.

Before You Begin

Read the Configuration Guidelines for Soft Partitions.

Use one of the following methods to expand a soft partition:

• From the Enhanced Storage tool within the Solaris Management Console, open the Volumes node. Choose the soft partition that you want to expand, then choose Action⇒Properties. Follow the onscreen instructions. For more information, see the online help.

• To add space to a soft partition, use the following form of the metattach command:

  # metattach [-s diskset] soft-partition size

  diskset

  Specifies the name of the disk set in which the soft partition exists.

  soft-partition

  Specifies the name of an existing soft partition.

  size

  Specifies the amount of storage space to add.

Example 13–4 Expanding a Soft Partition

The following example shows how to attach space to a soft partition. The file system is then expanded using the growfs command while the soft partition is online and mounted.

# mount /dev/md/dsk/d20 /home2
# metattach d20 10g
# growfs -M /home2 /dev/md/rdsk/d20

For more information on the growfs command, see Expanding a File System Using the growfs Command.