I have a few big spinning drives that I formatted as EXT4 without adding a GPT first. They work just fine on Linux obviously, but I need to move this drives to a FreeBSD box, and the mount plugin for EXT4 won't support these. These are big drives and copying over the whole contents to another drive be able to wipe them and then transfer back after partitioning would take many days. Is there a way to move the partition forward a bit and add a partition table?
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Unfortunately, no, not really.
It should be possible to shrink the filesystem and then move it backwards (gparted can probably do this) by 1 MB to allow for a GPT partition table. However, any interruption to the migration process will destroy your filesystem and all its data. At that point you realise you should have taken a backup. And at this point it's better to take the backup and do the copy properly and safely.
Chris Davies
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