From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Feb 17 11:12:17 2012 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2CE691065670 for ; Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:12:17 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from petefrench@ingresso.co.uk) Received: from constantine.ingresso.co.uk (constantine.ingresso.co.uk [IPv6:2a02:b90:3002:e550::3]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C0FB38FC18 for ; Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:12:16 +0000 (UTC) Received: from dilbert.london-internal.ingresso.co.uk ([10.64.50.6] helo=dilbert.ingresso.co.uk) by constantine.ingresso.co.uk with esmtps (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256) (Exim 4.76 (FreeBSD)) (envelope-from ) id 1RyLjZ-00059g-HB; Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:12:13 +0000 Received: from petefrench by dilbert.ingresso.co.uk with local (Exim 4.76 (FreeBSD)) (envelope-from ) id 1RyLjZ-0009kp-GN; Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:12:13 +0000 To: freebsd@jdc.parodius.com, wblock@wonkity.com In-Reply-To: <20120217030806.GA62601@icarus.home.lan> Message-Id: From: Pete French Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:12:13 +0000 Cc: mandrews@bit0.com, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, 000.fbsd@quip.cz Subject: Re: New BSD Installer X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:12:17 -0000 > I wasn't aware you could do that. I was only aware that it was the > other way around. That (my) misconception seems to also be relayed > by others such as Miroslav who said: Should this not be the recommended way of doing things even for MBR disks ? I have a lot of machines booting from gmirror, but we always do it by mirroring MBR partitions (or GPT ones). I cant see why you would want to do it the other way round in fact. It doesnt gain you anything does it ? As someone else pointed out, you do need to partition the two drives to match, and add bootloaders to them. But thats not really a great hardship is it, and everything just works properly. You dont need any different bootloader (as it sees the start of the drive and the gmirror stuff is at the end). An example I have here is a machine setup with a pair of drives, each has 3 partitions on it. ada0s1 ada0s2 and ada0s, plsu the correspoding ones on ada1. The two s1 partititons are gmirrored for boot, and the two s2 partitions are configured for swap, and the two s3 partitions are also mirrored, but using ZFS instead of gmirror. That kind of configuration is only really possible if you put the mirroring inside the external partition table. -pete.