Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 14:42:50 +0200 (EET) From: "Andrew V. Stesin" <stesin@elvisti.kiev.ua> To: lehey.pad@sni.de (Greg Lehey) Cc: jfieber@indiana.edu, doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Frustrated....doc@freebsd.org Message-ID: <199601221242.OAA15406@office.elvisti.kiev.ua> In-Reply-To: <199601181707.SAA22673@nixpbe.pdb.sni.de> from "Greg Lehey" at Jan 18, 96 06:03:14 pm
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# > I formatted a new hard drive once, but I don't think I would be able to
# > duplicate, much less describe, the experience.
#
# Of course not. It's indescribable :-)
#
# Greg
#
Please, here is the description of how I'm doing this.
Disclaimer: worked for me on SCSI disks, maybe IDE has some
differences? At least some variations of "BIOS LBA mode"
and especially "PIO mode >= 2" didn't work for some of my
friends.
Disclaimer 2: I have a strong opinion that in case you do want
to have more than one OS on your machine, for example 3 ones,
you'd better have 3 boot partitions on your boot HDD,
inside "whatever BIOS thinks to be the first 1024 cyls" area,
and it's better to have FreeBSD
to be installed _after_ all messydoses, os-half's or whatever.
Generally this way of setting things up saves the time, though
some people are doing another, more complex things too.
Disclaimer 3: Last time I was adding a new disk was two days ago,
when I was installing an IBM DPES 31080S 1.08Gb SCSI disk
instead of a Conner CFP 1060S, which died. Just now I don't
have a sacrificial disk to play with, I'm describing the procedure
from memory. All errors and typos are mine.
1. 2.1 and later FreeBSD systems do have a copy of sysinstall program
in /stand. You need to have 'gzipped executables' enabled in your
kernel, though (GENERIC kernel has).
2. Add a new HDD and make the system recognize it correctly during
the boot probe. I even do a low-level format of the disk with
a DOS scsifmt utility, to be sure that the disk is virgin clean,
no old bootloaders, partition tables, etc.
3. Launch /stand/sysinstall. Select "Custom" install, than "Partition"
the disk. I presume you aren't adding a new boot disk :)
For example you have sd0 and sd1 already here, so switch "on" only
a checkbox for your new disk (i.e. sd2).
4. You get to a b/w screen of visual fdisk. Ok, you see an empty disk;
I usually press "A" (this means "use All disk") here. YMMV,
of course. For SCSI disks, after "A" command, when it asks about cooperation
with other OSes, I answer "No", and than "Yes" ("Yes, I insist").
Geometry warnings are to be ignored for SCSI disks.
Anyway, at this step you must perform all the actions similarly
to those you do in DOS with it's fdisk -- to create a partition
table which suit your needs. If you want to have not only a FreeBSD
slice on this disk, but someone's else, I'd suggest booting DOS
and create that "other" partition with dos' fdisk first.
[... maybe a screen shapshots of visual fdisk must be added here? ...]
For example, assume you have created a slice which is called
sd2s3 with the above procedure (why "s3"? simply for example,
if the disk is FreeBSD only, that will be sd2s1).
5. Than press "W" ("Write the partition table") here. Than "Yes",
you really want it to be written now. Ok, your'e done with
"partitions", or "slices" as they are called in UNIX world.
Pressing "Q" will return you to the upper menu now.
Note. Yes, there is another fdisk around, it is command-line
oriented. You may use it, of course. But I found visual fdisk
from sysinstall to be more convenient and less headache to use;
and you don't need a 'bc' calculator handy to count sectors,
cylinders and other mistery. :) BTW it seems to me that
vizual fdisk has some useful buit-in deep magic in it. ;)
6. Now you'd like to sub-divide the fresh partition (slice) into
pieces, let's call them "subslices" -- each one has
it's own file system in it. Their names are derived from the
slice name with adding a single letter to it. Some of the letters
do have a "reserved" meaning:
'a' is for bootable filesystem, usually only a boot drive has one
(sd0s1a, or sd0a);
'b' is for swap area (it won't have a filesystem on it);
'c' subslice is used for the purpose of accessing the whole
FreeBSD slice, in our case it will be sd2s3c; DON'T TOUCH IT.
'd' [... I didn't see one since 2.1, is it still used? ...]
The letters 'e' and further are to mark subslices which contain
filesystems. So assume we have 1000000 sectors (500Mb) in our
sd2s3 slice, and want to have 100Mb of swap area and 2 filesystems
inside it, one is 300Mb and one is 100Mb. The first 123456 sectors
of the disk are used by other OSes, we don't care.
The program which is called "disklabel" is used for this purpose.
/stand/sysinstall has a "visual disklabel" built-in, but I
always was afraid that it will do something with my existing
filesystems (it shows them all in it's menu, and I'm not brave enough
to check what will it do :) So I'm using another, standalone disklabel
program.
So, after doing fdisk I quit from visual sysinstall and do
disklabel -r -e sd2
7. disklabel will call your ${EDITOR} on a formatted disk label
of a new slice (there's a single FreeBSD slice on sd2, our sd2s3,
you remember?) The only line which you need to pay attention at
is the following one starts with "c:"
# size: offset: fstype: [ .... ]
[... whatever is written here ...]
c: 1000000 123456 unused 0 0
Those 1000000 sectors are those you will divide into parts.
The next few minutes you'll fight with your ${EDITOR} and
bc calculator, calculating offsets/sectors; at least, you'd
get the following after your "c:" slice description:
# size: offset: fstype: [ .... ]
c: 1000000 123456 unused 0 0
b: 200000 123456 swap
e: 600000 323456 4.2BSD 0 0 0
f: 200000 923456 4.2BSD 0 0 0
Make sure your b: e: f: subslices are not overlapping each other,
and the last subslice (f:) doesn't go anywhere _after the last
available disk sector_.
Exit from your editor, saving the file;
disklabel will write an edited label to disk.
8. Subslices are created; now create file systems inside them:
newfs /dev/rsd2s3e
newfs /dev/rsd2s3f
Reading newfs manpage will be Ok before using it :)
9. Check are they Ok:
fsck /dev/rsd2s3e
fsck /dev/rsd2s3f
10. You are done. Auto mounting new filesystems on reboot?
Edit /etc/fstab accordingly.
--
With best regards -- Andrew Stesin.
+380 (44) 2760188 +380 (44) 2713457 +380 (44) 2713560
An undocumented feature is a coding error.
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