Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 18:33:30 +0000 From: "Ian Kallen" <ian@gamespot.com> To: questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: The Old New Disk Question Message-ID: <199608121828.SAA06351@gamespot.com>
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I spent hours just trying to get myself to a point where I had proper geometry set up and could newfs the desired partitions. I can't speak authoritatively but I can offer my experience, fwiw. First of all, arm yourself with the man pages for fdisk & disklabel. Then get Greg Leahy's postscript document on it at ftp://freefall.freebsd.org/pub/incoming/disks.ps.gz And get ready for some grief, this whole experience made me long for the format utility that comes with Solaris -- yes, Solaris's format utility is actually not bad: if it does'nt know the drive geometry, it offers you a menu item to ask you about the disk geometry which you can read off of the specs. Comparitively very user friendly. My effort involved setting up a Seagate SCSI 2 gig baracuda. I ended up using the DOS fdisk to really read the geometry, took notes on what my numbers "should" be and then booted fbsd and used my notes to correct it's misunderstanding of the drive's layout in fbsd's fdisk. Then used "disklabel sd1 auto" -- I had to use "disklabel -e sd1" to make corrections -- once everything was cogently layed out in the disklabel, "newfs -d0 /dev/rsd1d" (where d is the partition on sd1 that I wanted a filesystem created on...) and so forth for any other partitions defined in the disklabel. Changes made to the fstab and voila: I was done. <huff> This process really really ought to be simplified and better documented. A unified fdisk and disklabel utility is sorely needed, not sysinstall, which seems to insist that you have mount points you don't need and wants to newfs your existing filesystems. This issue of disk management is a real barrier for folks new to fbsd -- one would want disk swapping and set-up to be fast and easy but if one must "work around" fdisk and disklabel's deficiencies everytime a new filesystem needs to be added, freeBSD is going to scare a lot of people over to another OS. Actually, I don't know if Linux offers a credible alternative, I played around with it at home in the past but never needed to add disks. I heard they adopted the net/2 tcp-ip code since then though so they can't be all bad ;) </huff> > From: zeeb@digitaladvantage.net (Russ Panula) > To: Mike <flaq@synwork.com> > Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org > Subject: Re: The Old New Disk Question > Date: Sun, 11 Aug 1996 18:09:19 -0600 > Organization: Digital Advantage Corporation > On Sun, 11 Aug 1996 14:21:07 -0500 (CDT), you wrote: > > >I have just spent the past three hours searching the archives for a step > >by step explanation of how to add a new hard drive. I want to add a > >fourth drive to my box. I saw this question asked MANY times in the > >archives, but replies were few and far between. > > > >I tried using /stand/sysinstall and it would core on me everytime I tried > >to create the newfs. > > > >TIA > > > > > I've had the core dump problem with sysinstall too.. I think it has > something to do with an invalid partition table (no magic ;-). Try > booting with a DOS disk, running fdisk, creating a partition on the > disk, then boot into FBSD and see if you can proceed from there. > > Russ > > Ian Kallen ian@gamespot.com Director of Technology & Web Administration http://www.gamespot.com
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