Hello,
I am newly joined to this forum. Need advise on how to increase the size of a partition on Solaris 10 Server post the installation process. My requirement is, Server is installed with OS now I have change the partition size by dropping few and increasing the other by acquiring the blocks from the dropped ones.

Server Spec: Sparc 420R with 2 HDD 300GB each. Os - Solaris 10(installed) each disk is sliced to 7. Randomly partitions(size) got created.

Please do pint me the thread, if it this is already discussed.

Hello, welcome to LQ.

If your file system is UFS you could try gparted, which can be used a live cd or usb key.

Unfortunately, gparted doesn't support growing UFS.

If you use UFS, backup all valuable data you might already have created then reinstall the OS and select a single ZFS pool using all the available disk.

Sorry, I should have checked before answering

Thank you for the comments.

I tried to re-install OS on the machine, but it failed due to DVD drive problem. I used to see a message whenever I type " (0) OK boot cdrom "Can't open DVD device" I believe this is an hardware issue.

Could you please get me some reference on NETWORK based installation for the same. I mean System requisite to start network based installation?

Thanks!

How long the media verification take place. I did format of required disk using the "format" command. On the screen it say "Format complete" as below
format> format
Ready to format. Formatting cannot be interrupted
and takes 362 minutes (estimated). Continue? y
Beginning format. The current time is Tue Jul 3 15:38:42 2012

Formatting...
97% complete (00:04:59 remaining) done

Verifying media...
pass 0 - pattern = 0xc6dec6de

It is running for almost 14 hours by now. Not completed. any idea?

This looks too long. You might have hardware issues. Why did you reformat the disk ? Disks are always already formatted by their manufacturer.

we just wanted to remove all the existing partition and make it as one,so we reformatted it .

Now the format is complete. My concern is to combine two partitions into one. Please find the below

Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks

2 backup wu 0 - 45264 279.38GB (45265/0/0) 585910160
6 usr wm 42 - 45264 279.12GB (45223/0/0) 585366512

above TWO parts needs to be combined together. Could you please help me on this?

There was no need to reformat the disk. (Low-level) formatting is the process that create tracks and sectors on the disk.

They are already combined. Just use slice 6 for your needs. Slice 2 is by convention the whole disk and shouldn't be used to create a file system or whatever.

Would like to get clarify the following.
1. /opt will be used to install optional packages - correct?
2. i have disk 0 which is partitioned like below
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 15G 444M 15G 3% /
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s3 9.9G 3.2G 6.6G 33% /usr
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s4 48G 139M 48G 1% /var
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s5 48G 357M 47G 1% /tmp
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s6 3.9G 1.3G 2.6G 34% /opt

Will I be able to increase size of /opt by reducing some disk space from any of the above? Will that work?
3. iostat -En shows some hard errors, what that really mean ex:
c0t1d0 Soft Errors: 1 Hard Errors: 1938 Transport Errors: 0
Vendor: SEAGATE Product: ST3300007LC Revision: 0005 Serial No:
Size: 299.99GB <299992629248 bytes> - Could you please comment on it?

Usually but not necessarily.
Yes but this will be more or less complex depending on the partition layout.If you have enough disk space elsewhere to backup the filesystem(s) that will need to be recreated, yes.
That's odd. Have a look at the system logs (dmesg) to see what blocks are in cause.

Thanks for helping on this. We re-formatted again followed by a reboot. Now we are not seeing any hard errors or soft errors which we reported earlier.

We have below query. Out HDD total size is 300GB
Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 root wm 3565 - 6805 20.00GB (3241/0/0) 41951504
1 swap wu 0 - 1620 10.01GB (1621/0/0) 20982224
2 backup wm 0 - 45264 279.38GB (45265/0/0) 585910160
3 usr wm 1944 - 5184 20.00GB (3241/0/0) 41951504
4 var wm 14027 - 16457 15.00GB (2431/0/0) 31466864
5 unassigned wm 6097 - 41740 220.00GB (35644/0/0) 461375936
6 unassigned wm 1296 - 1943 4.00GB (648/0/0) 8387712
7 unassigned wm 21957 - 45264 143.86GB (23308/0/0) 301698752

We do not want to see the overlapping partitions 5/6/7 - is there any way to remove them and make it as one?