GPT Question

[Derek Funk]

On 11/10/2010 9:34 PM, Mark Caudill wrote:
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> Firstly, hello list. This is my first post here and while I'm a long
> time Linux user, I'm a recent FreeBSD convert so please bear with me.
> Yesterday I installed an extra hard drive that used to be in a Windows 7
> box. In sysinstall I ran fdisk then label to try to get the disk ready.
> The problem was that even though after I hit 'w' and it didn't give any
> errors, when I did a `ls /dev/ad*` it was still showing the old
> partitions, even after a reboot. I tried running fdisk manually and a
> few other things I found on Google but they all seemed to just be
> silently failing since they never showed an error but the changes never
> really went into effect. When I was first building out this box I had an
> issue partitioning the disks but the behavior was different in that it
> errored with messages about not being able to commit or write the
> changes to disk. That issue turned out to be with some GPTs on the drive
> which I was able to remove in Linux with parted. Anyway, I figured that
> there was a chance that this might be a GPT issue since this drive came
> form the same machine as the other. I couldn't remember what command I
> had run and didn't feel like pulling the drive into another machine so I
> just ran `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad12 bs=512` and let it run. That must
> have done the trick because I was then able to partition the disk in
> sysinstall and all is well. What I'm wondering is what really went on
> here? I'm not clear at all as to why FreeBSD (or some mechanism within
> this installation) isn't able to handle this. Or was this a GPT issue at
> all? I'd like to find out what was going on so that I don't chase my
> tail again on issues like this in the future. Thanks.
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My understanding is, if you are using FreeBSD 8.x, sysinstall / fdisk 
will not write disk partitions.  gpart is used now.