sysinstall and mfs I'm out of Ideas.

[Mark]

--- On Fri, 2/5/10, Martin McCormick <martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu> wrote:

> From: Martin McCormick <martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu>
> Subject: sysinstall and mfs I'm out of Ideas.
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Date: Friday, February 5, 2010, 2:22 PM
>     After about a week
> of trying, I don't think sysinstall
> will  install FreeBSD when used with mfsbsd. I
> launched mfsbsd
> from a CDROM and it works fine. I also used dd to feed the
> mfsboot.img file to the boot sector on the system's hard
> drive
> and that also worked fine. mfsbsd doesn't appear to be the
> problem.  Everything but sysinstall works as one would
> expect.
> 
>     Sysinstall may either be confused
> because the host is in
> multi-user mode or it may be trying to protect what it
> thinks is
> the system's boot drive from damage. It absolutely will
> not
> write one byte to /dev/ad0 partitions even though it sees
> the
> drive. the rest of sysinstall appears to be normal except
> for
> its fear about writing to /dev/ad0sx.
> 
>     I will be very happy to be proven wrong,
> but I don't
> know what else to do to sysinstall to get it to use that
> drive.
> 
>     It does work from the local console in
> single-user mode
> from the CDROM. I greatly appreciate all the help and
> welcome
> any new ideas, but it appears to be back to the drawing
> board
> for remotely-done upgrades.
> 
> Martin McCormick
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I'm sure you have already read this from man sysinstall, but it may give a hint to something you may have missed.  

    <<<<   Note: Nothing is actually written to disk by this function, an
             explicit call to diskPartitionWrite being required for that to happen. >>>>

     diskPartitionWrite
             Causes any pending MBR changes (typically from the
             diskPartitionEditor function) to be written out.

             Variables: None


<<< Note: No file system data is actually written to disk until an
             explicit call to diskLabelCommit is made. >>>



 diskLabelCommit
             Writes out all pending disklabel information and creates and/or
             mounts any file systems which have requests pending from the
             diskLabelEditor function.

             Variables: None