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Date:      Mon, 29 Jul 1996 00:15:26 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Ian Kallen <spidaman@well.com>
To:        dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: adding disks and the disklabel question
Message-ID:  <Pine.SOL.3.91.960728234131.2089B-100000@well>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.94.960728201436.605A-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu>

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Thanks for indulging me...

On Sun, 28 Jul 1996, Doug White wrote:
> Did you dismount it first?  
>
It's not mounted....there's no filesystem :)
 
> Maybe single user mode?  Your first command should have succeeded.  

I actually had not tried that
> 
> Try dropping the B, it specifies to install the boot code (which you don't
> need on a second disk).  
> 
> Did you note the first paragraph here?  That disk will be _dedicated_ to
> FreeBSD.  It can't have anything on it.  I'd use dd and /dev/zero to
> overwrite the first few clusters to completely erase the disk.  BE
> CAREFUL, you can thrash the wrong disk this way..
> 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd1 bs=1k count=512  
			     ^
right, taken great pains not to mistype a zero for that one!  yow!
well, that eliminated the "write: Read-only file system" error!  this is 
progress.  now when I do a 
"disklabel -r sd1"  I get this...

# /dev/rsd1c:
type: unknown
disk:
label:
flags:
and a bunch of disk geometry details that don't concur with the geometry 
for sd0 (output of "disklabel -r sd0"):
# /dev/rsd0c:
type: SCSI
disk: sd0s2
label:
flags:
(details of disk geometry and partitions...)

Now since they're both Connor 1 gig drives (cps1060s is the model, I think)
should I assume that the differences between the geometry reading stem from 
my boot drive having a 150 meg dos slice (I guess that'd be sd0s1) which 
disklabel displays no awareness of that I can see, whereas my new disk is 
now (literally) a blank slate?

Tomarrow I'll drop down to single user mode and see if I can get the disk 
partitions set up.  (I pulled an all nighter last night setting up a new 
system disk for a different machine -- a 4 gig seagate but the bugs in the 
3c590 drivers that denied me sleep are another tangent ;) ...BTW, once I set 
up a stub DOS slice on the 4 gig seagate, booteasy ceased to screw up, it'd 
been stopping at F?, floppy boot and specifying sd(0,a)/kernel at the 
boot prompt worked fine but booteasy was hosed -- now I'm gonna fade off 
into a sleep plagued by disk-geometry dimensia %}

> > sysinstall seems to want to make mods to my existing boot drive -- it all 
> > seems geared for installation not supplementing disks and file systems.
> 
> That is true.  
sysinstall's functionality really ought to be extended...

> If you have a postscript viewer/printer, grab this:
> 
> ftp://freefall.freebsd.org/pub/incoming/disks.ps.gz
> 
> This is the added chapter to "Installing...FreeBSD" that details the long
> long way to adding disks, as well as anything and everything you'd want to
> know about hard drives.  It details the fdisk/disktab/disklabel/long way.
> :)

Yes, good document.  Should be titled "Everything you never wanted but 
need to know about /etc/disktab!"  Still never gleaned a path out my 
disk addition quagmire from it -- but anyway your hack to write over the 
boot clusters seemed to get me over one of the hurdles: thanks!

The next interface will not be another desktop metaphor.... Ian Kallen ....
http://www.well.com/user/spidaman/ ....the revolution will not be televised.
===== TO RECEIVE MY PGP KEY, SEND MAIL TO spidey-pgp-info@well.com =======




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