format slice

Jerry McAllister jerrymc at clunix.cl.msu.edu
Fri Mar 11 11:34:39 PST 2005


> 
> Hello,
> 
> I have a freebsd installation on a disk with two slices. One of them has the
> current freebsd install, the other has a win2k installation. I want to
> convert the win2k slice to a freebsd slice (by deleting the old one and add
> a new one). I followed the handbook but when I try to delete the win2k
> slice, and want to write the changes to the disk, sysinstall returns "a disk
> error". The steps I took were simple:
> 
> - run sysinstall en select fdisk
> - choose delete on the NTFS slice 
> - Write changes
> 
> Then sysinstall complains that it cannot do that (no specific information on
> the cause of the error is displayed). 
> 
> Does anyone know what can be wrong and how can I solve this?

Well, it looks like you started right. 
But "write changes" can cover a lot of things - all of which 
need to be done.

After you delete the NTFS slice,  you must create a new FreeBSD slice
in its place.   Then you need to do the disklabel part to make at
least one partition in the slice (more are possible if you want to
divide it for some reason.   Then that (those) slice(s) must
be newfs-ed.  You also need to establish a mount point and mount the
newly newfs-ed filesystem(s).   Sysinstall should do all that for you 
if you do all of its steps before bailing out of sysinstall.
It might not do the mount though.  But, it should create the mount
point and put the mount line in /etc/fstab.

Alternatively, you can do it all yourself and skip sysinstall.
That is what I normally do.   
Study the man pages for each of these before starting.  They 
have recently been improved, but can still be very confusing.

The steps are:
            fdisk          -- overwrites the NTFS slice and creates a 
                              new FreeBSD slice in its place.  Set it
                              active if you want to boot from it.
            disklabel      -- writes a FreeBSD label and divides the
                              slice in to partitions.
            newfs          -- creates a filesystem in each partition
                              you run it on.
            mkdir          -- create the new mount point  mkdir /newmnt
                              or whatever you want to call it
            edit /etc/fstab  -- to enter your mount information so it
                                will mount at boot time without you doing
                                by hand all the time.
            fsck           -- the new file system, just in case.
            mount -a       -- To mount the file system
                            
If you have done everything and it still doesn't work, then more
information is needed to make any good guesses.   But, check all 
this first.

////jerry
> 
> 
> 
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