Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2006 20:18:10 -0800 From: Darren David <darren@3x3x3.org> To: freebsd-questions@lists.freebsd.org Cc: brett <brett@librum.org> Subject: Need help switching between two FreeBSD boot drives Message-ID: <43BDEF82.4060100@3x3x3.org>
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hi all- i've got one i've been tearing my hair out over here, and even after finding some information out there, i'm still totally lost. this may take a while to explain, so please bear with me. I've got 2 80GB SATA drives in my FreeBSD machine, which are mapped as /dev/ad4 and /dev/ad6. I've got 5_STABLE installed on 1 drive, and my plan is to get a working install of 6_STABLE on the other drive, so i can take my time to work out the kinks with the upgrade on the 2nd drive (it hasn't been straighforward) and be able to switch back to my working 5_STABLE machine as needed. That's the plan, anyway. So I followed the general instructions here: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.html#NEW-HUGE-DISK to clone drive 1 over to drive 2. very cool, no problems, i can pick either drive in the bootloader and boot up there. so all is well and good until i boot into drive 2 and start the upgrade process. I realize the /dev/ad4 and /dev/ad6 are not exactly fixed. It seems almost arbitrary which drive ends up mapped as /dev/ad6 and /dev/ad4, and this caused me to nearly munge all of the data on the working 5_STABLE install before i caught myself. If i boot into drive 1 at boot time, everything ends up being mounted at /dev/ad6. If i mount into drive 2 at boot time, the same thing happens. Mind you, i /did/ check /etc/fstab to ensure that all was well, but i ended up with a weird situation where, say, / would be /dev/ad4s1a and all of the other mountpoints were at /dev/ad6*. ugh. confusing! I found this page, which explains the problem /somewhat/: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-steps.html but to be completely honest, the concept didn't stick. What i need help with, since these drives are exactly the same size and make, is how i can do the following: 1) determine the relationship between Drive 1/Drive 2 and ad4/ad6 2) determine exactly which physical drive i am working on at any given time, since the /dev node mappings seem to be malleable 3) enable an environment where i can safely and surely boot into either drive and know for a fact that the right partitions are mounted ( all of the data on all of the partitions aside from / is mirrored, so it's practically impossible to tell which drive is which ) 4) (bonus points) My bootloader shows the following on boot: F1: FreeBSD F2: FreeBSD F5: Drive 1 a) I've only got 1 FreeBSD install on this drive, so what is F2? It just beeps at me when i try it b) I assume that "F5: Drive 1" means that the drive i'm staring at the options for is Drive 2, adn that selecting F5 will toggle to Drive 1? Just clarifying! i hope this is an easy one to solve. i look forward to any and all help! thanks in advance, darren david
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