Possible errors in FreeBSD 5.1

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> Jerry McAllister wrote:
> 
> >>I have come accross a few possible bugs or errors while using FreeBSD 
> >>5.1-Current. I wrote them down and thought I would at least pass on the 
> >>information per chance it would help someone, etc. I know that some of 
> >>the errors could just be me, etc.
> >>
> >>FreeBSD 5.1-Current Possible bugs:
> >>
> >>1. When I installed FreeBSD on my machine at work, I had 10 GB of 80 GB 
> >>available for it on a partitioned hard disk. I set up FreeBSD to only 
> >>have two slices in the partition, one for swap, which was 300 MB, and 
> >>the remaining 9700 MB was allocated for the / slice. However, when I was 
> >>in FreeBSD's Fdisk utility, I could not set up a slice larger than 9499 
> >>MB, or else the creation of the slices would fail, and so would the 
> >>installation.
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >First of all, your terminology is backwards.  The slice is the
> >main unit which is then divided in to partitions for such as root 
> >and /usr or whatever.   eg you have a 10GB FreeBSD slice which
> >you want to divide in to a 9700 MB root partition and a 300 MB swap
> >partition.
> >
> >Second, this all may be due to different ways of expressing the
> >math of disk units.   What actual size in blocks is your 10 GB
> >slice and how big in blocks are your 300 MB and 9700 MG partitions?
> >Also, one virtual cylinder will be eaten for the boot records.
> >
> >////jerry
> >
> I don't know the answer to that question. If there is a problem, I hope 
> it will be fixed.

Just look at the outputs from fdisk and disklabel and they will tell you.

Presuming your disk is device da0  (first SCSI disk), type:

    fdisk -s da0         lists the number of blocks/sectors in each slice.
Then
    disklabel -r da0s1   lists the number of blocks for each partition
                               in slice 1 of that disk.  

If the disk is other than the first SCSI disk you will need to use 
the appripriate device, such as da1 for the second SCSI disk or wd0 or 
whatever for IDE (I don't have any IDE disks to look at right now).

If that 10 GB slice is not the first slice you will need to use a 
different number with the 's' in the disklabel command - such as da1s3 
would be the second SCSI disk drive and the third slice on that disk.

Then realize that 
  blocks/sectors are 512 bytes and 
  Megabytes are 1048576 bytes or 2048 blocks  (not 1,000,000 bytes)
  GigaBytes are 1073741824 bytes or 2097152 blocks (not 1,000,000,000 bytes).

BUT NOTE that manufacturers rate their drives using 1,000,000 bytes
as a Megabyte and 1,000,000,000 bytes as a Gigabyte so there is quite
a difference between what the vendor claims and what the system claims
the disk will hold.

////jerry

> 
> 
> James Leone
> 
>