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Date:      Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:45:10 +0100
From:      =?utf-8?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=C3=B8rgrav?= <des@des.no>
To:        "Peter Steele" <psteele@maxiscale.com>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD boot menu is missing
Message-ID:  <861vwx4fd5.fsf@ds4.des.no>
In-Reply-To: <2ACA3DE8F9758A48B8BE2C7A847F91F240CEB4@polaris.maxiscale.com> (Peter Steele's message of "Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:53:11 -0800")
References:  <2ACA3DE8F9758A48B8BE2C7A847F91F240CE6B@polaris.maxiscale.com> <20081126153510.6062cd55@bhuda.mired.org> <2ACA3DE8F9758A48B8BE2C7A847F91F240CE99@polaris.maxiscale.com> <20081126190545.17b79195@bhuda.mired.org> <2ACA3DE8F9758A48B8BE2C7A847F91F240CEB4@polaris.maxiscale.com>

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"Peter Steele" <psteele@maxiscale.com> writes:
> Man, I wish I'd known this. I built a whole automated framework around
> this, assuming you couldn't set up the initial mirror drive with a live
> file system. I'll have to try your solution; it is definitely the way to
> go. We are dealing with identical size drives as well so this shouldn't
> be a problem.

Just make sure you leave a few unallocated blocks at the end of the disk
(for gmirror metadata).  In most cases, this happens automatically,
because the size of the disk is not a multiple of the (fake) cylinder
size.  To pick one at random, I have a Maxtor 6B300S0 here with
586112591 LBA sectors where the fake c/h/s geometry only adds up to
586111680 sectors, leaving 911 sectors at the end.

> We don't want to mirror the whole drive, just the OS partitions. I
> decided to go with the full slice mirroring because of what was
> described in this link. If mirroring the partitions in the slice is the
> better way to go, then that's fine my me.=20

Mirroring the entire slice is far simpler.  If you mirror individual
partitions, you have to label them *before* you newfs them.

I would mirror the whole drive, though - and I would use ZFS, with which
you can easily transition to larger drives (just replace them one by one
and resilver in between - you can even do it online if your disks are
hot-swappable)

DES
--=20
Dag-Erling Sm=C3=B8rgrav - des@des.no



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