[HOWTO] FreeBSD system disk mirroring with GEOM

[Paul Mather]

On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 17:36 +0100, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:
> FYI: I've prepared a detailed step-by-step command list on how to
> establish a RAID-1 (mirror) for the system partitions with GEOM and
> gmirror(8). You can find the resulting HOWTO document under
> http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/mirror/

Congratulations on a useful and comprehensive HOWTO!  I have only one
question: in the first approach ("Whole Disk, Acceptable, Less
Flexible"), why do you create a slice if you are using the whole disk
anyway?  Is this simply because it's good form to put a valid partition
table on a bootable PC disk?

The reason I ask is because when I set up my bootable gmirror (using a
technique similar to the one you describe) I omitted the fdisk step and
used bsdlabel on (my equivalent of) /dev/mirror/gm0 (not gm0s1).  I've
not had any problems booting the mirror, nor in using it.  It also means
one less GEOM layer to go through, right?

Cheers,

Paul.
-- 
e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

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