[Question]How do I list current namespaces and manage namespaces

[videoguy]

I downloaded Windows x64 version of this tool. I am running on a Windows 11 system. I have SSD that lists it can support atmost two namespaces when I passed -i option. It has one namespace that took all the space.
I like to delete existing namespaces and create two namespaces. Especially I like to create one namespace that is 4-5GB in size and the remaining space for primary namespace.

How do I do it using this tool?
I appreciate if you can point me to examples.

Thanks

[vonericsen]

Hi @videoguy,

openSeaChest does not support this currently, but we have talked about adding it in internal conversations.
Let me see if we can have some bandwidth to have someone work on this.

I've done this myself with nvme-cli in Linux before since it does have the ability to run these commands. I don't remember the exact commands right now, but you may want to look into that as a workaround for now. You could get a USB bootable version of something like Ubuntu, install nvme-cli (since it's not there by default as I recall), then do the setup you would like and go back to Windows. Be aware that when deleting a namespace this will remove any data you have on the device.

Going off of memory when I created 4 namespaces on one of our older enterprise drives, I think the process was:

1. Detach current namespace (full device)
2. Delete current namespace (full device)
3. Create new namespace(s) the way you want
4. Attach new namespace(s)

One issue I know of in Windows around these commands is that Microsoft will block them unless you are in the PE/RE mode (during install of Windows or if you boot in the Windows recovery mode, this is a PE image as well).
I know our tools can be run in PE as we build them to be able to run here, but it may be slightly confusing since they are blocked in normal Windows use-cases.

If you have any trouble trying to figure out nvme-cli please post back here and we will do our best to help you even if it's been a little while since we've done namespace management with it 😄

Ideas I think our team can consider when creating this feature:

• an option that performs all steps for all namespaces a user wants. Will need to figure out exact command line
• Instead of command line options, maybe a configuration file, JSON format, that we can parse and use to configure all namespaces for a user to keep it a single option to the tool.