Problem formatting new hard drive.

[Joshua Oreman]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2003 at 02:11:58PM -0400 or thereabouts, James Pancoast seemed to write:
> 
> 
> 	I'm new to FreeBSD (I installed it on a system this weekend).  I've been 
> trying to add a new Hard drive, following the directions at: 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/formatting-media/x66.html
> 
> 	Going through sysinstall didn't work, so I tried the command line 
> (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad2 count=2).  However, when I run that command (as 
> root), I get "Operation not permitted".  Anyone have an idea what I'm doing 
> wrong?

Are you running 5.x? The GEOM code in the kernel puts some extra sanity checks
in. I bet some partition on the disk is being used for something.
Try this:
# mount | grep ad2
# swapinfo | grep ad2
If any of those return anything, swapoff/umount the relevant partitions.
Also, if you install /usr/ports/graphics/graphviz, you can get a diagram
of what GEOM thinks is in use:
# sysctl -b kern.geom.confdot > temp.dot
# dot -Tgif -o temp.gif temp.dot
Then view temp.gif with your favorite gfx program. Look for 'locks' info.

If you're running 4.x, or if this fails, check permissions on the device.

Hope this helps,
-- Josh

> 
> 	The drive used to be in a Linux system, and an fdisk /dev/ad2 gives this:
> ******* Working on device /dev/ad2 *******
> parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
> cylinders=25232 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)
> 
> Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
> parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
> cylinders=25232 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)
> 
> Media sector size is 512
> Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
> Information from DOS bootblock is:
> The data for partition 1 is:
> sysid 131 (0x83),(Linux native)
>     start 63, size 25433793 (12418 Meg), flag 0
>         beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
>         end: cyl 1023/ head 15/ sector 63
> The data for partition 2 is:
> <UNUSED>
> The data for partition 3 is:
> <UNUSED>
> The data for partition 4 is:
> <UNUSED>
> 
> 	Thanks.
> 
> 
> -- 
> James Pancoast
> jamesp at uversa.com
> www.uversa.com
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