Can't add new 1TB disk in FreeBSD 6.1

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 08:03:46AM -0700, Don O'Neil wrote:
> > I just swapped out an old 500G disk with a 1TB one and I'm trying to 
> > label it and mount it...
> > 
> > If I run bsdlabel -w ad4, I get:
> > 
> > bsdlabel: Geom not found
> > 
> > If I run sysinstall, it tells me that it can't write to the disk.
> > 
> > I've tried an old 'bypass': sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16, but that 
> > didn't help.
> > 
> > Can anyone help me get this new disk installed without having to boot 
> > off a recovery CD? The server is 500 miles away from me and I don't 
> > have direct console access.
> > Can you provide output from dmesg, as well as "geom disk list"?
> 
> OK... I tried:
> 
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 bs=512 count=1000
> dd: /dev/ad4: Operation not permitted

Did you "sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16" before doing this?

What's happening here is that GEOM isn't letting you overwrite the MBR
on the disk.  Setting kern.geom.debugflags=16 should permit that to
happen.

> # fdisk /dev/ad4
> ******* Working on device /dev/ad4 *******
> parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
> cylinders=1938021 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=1938021 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)
> 
> fdisk: invalid fdisk partition table found

This line right here looks very bad.  I would recommend running sade(8)
and properly configuring this disk.

> 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 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
>     start 63, size 1953525105 (953869 Meg), flag 80 (active)
>         beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
>         end: cyl 612/ head 15/ sector 63

This portion looks okay, although I guess the addressing mode chosen is
different on your system.  Most of my systems show the end CHS as
1023/254/63.

> Geometry output:
> 
> Geom name: ad4
> Providers:
> 1. Name: ad4
>    Mediasize: 1000204886016 (932G)
>    Sectorsize: 512
>    Mode: r0w0e0
>    fwsectors: 63
>    fwheads: 16

This looks okay.

> Nothing exciting coming from dmesg.

Thanks for providing the output like I requested.  :-)

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |