Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 11:04:38 +0100 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: Olivier Nicole <olivier.nicole@cs.ait.ac.th> Cc: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Am I getting too old Message-ID: <20140122110438.f7de3bf5.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <CA%2Bg%2BBvhVNSwXH%2BYCd5X4y6jjKTZJMSvPvpRj1N=NXessFYXOrg@mail.gmail.com> References: <CA%2Bg%2BBvhVNSwXH%2BYCd5X4y6jjKTZJMSvPvpRj1N=NXessFYXOrg@mail.gmail.com>
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On Wed, 22 Jan 2014 16:18:08 +0700, Olivier Nicole wrote: > Hi, > > in the old times (FreeBSD 8) it took me 5 minutes to partition a disk > for a test machine: create a couple of MS DOS partitions, install the > MBR, create FreeBSD partitions, done. It used to be working easily, > efficiently and reliably. I assume you're talking about the use of the traditional MBR partitioning tools: fdisk, disklabel / bsdlabel, newfs. Those are considered deprecated. If you're talking about sysinstall and the partitioning tool derived from it, called sade, those aren't being maintained anymore. > Now it had been one day since I tried to reproduce that with FreeBSD > 9, not to avail: I always end up with messaged saying things like > invalid partition, or stuff like that. I tried the traditional tools with FreeBSD 9 and 10, they still seem to work in case they _must_ be used, but gpart, being able to deal with GPT _and_ MBR partitioning, should be used today. The new installer, bsdinstall, is a thing on its own, it's probably fine for novice users, but usually dropping to CLI and issuing the commands often is the faster way to get things running, at least in my experience. > What was the rational behind the decision of breaking something that > used to work fine (that had been working fine for over 10 years) and > replace it with something that is ugly, unfriendly (you have to give > some types to the partitions, but nowhere is it written what type is > allowed or not) and that is not working? The documentation isn't fully integrated into the installer, but at least The FreeBSD Handbook has it covered: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/bsdinstall.html As always, I'd also like to point to those sources of high-quality information which is a good aid to get used to the new set of commands: http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/gmirror.html And this one about labels is also helpful: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/geom-glabel.html Still there should be no real reason why the traditional CLI tools should stop working. > Oh maybe if I choose to go all by default it will work, but I don't > want the default, I want to be allowed to make my own choices easily. Try the CLI tools. Use gpart for creating the partitions and then initialize them with newfs / tunefs as required. It's something new, but there's good documentation. Even manpages do already exist. :-) -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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