Broken Disk

[Matthew Seaman]

On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 07:36:11AM -0500, Jason Dusek wrote:

> I am trying to put a new disk on my system. I read the description of 
> the process in FreeBSD Unleashed and apparently I misunderstood it, 
> because I ended up installing a boot manager on the new disk. Now I can 
> not mount it - I get error messages like:

Presence of absence of a boot manager on the drive should make any
difference at all once the system is up and running.
 
> # mount /dev/ad1e /mnt/backup
> operation not permitted

/dev/ad1e is a very odd device name to be using.  As far as I remember
that's a backwards compatability thing from changes that were made
somewhere around the FreeBSD-3.x timeframe.  You probably want
/dev/ad1s1e
 
> How do I 'start over'? I have tried to add this disk many times with 
> /stand/sysinstall. Eventually I gave up and went to the command line 
> utilities as outlined in the handbook. The error I got was interesting, 
> but I have no idea what it means:
> 
> # fdisk -BI ad1
> ******* Working on device /dev/ad1 *******
> fdisk: invalid fdisk partition table found

You're going about this the right way, but you've run into a disk with
a label so scrambled it's confusing fdisk(8).  Old hacky trick is to
zero out the first few blocks of the drive, so that fdisk(8) thinks
the disk is completely virgin:

    # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad1 bs=512 count=10

Note that this will completely trash anything already on the drive.

Then use fdisk(8), disklabel(8)/bsdlabel(8), newfs(8) to create
filesystems.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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