a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop

[Chris Brennan]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 8:44 PM, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 4 Jan 2011, Chris Brennan wrote:
>
>  On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 3:56 AM, Ian Smith <smithi at nimnet.asn.au> wrote:
>>
>>  On Mon, 3 Jan 2011 16:31:17 -0500, Chris Brennan wrote:
>>> [.. trimming ccs, selectively quoting and de-gmailing a bit ..]
>>>
>>>
>> Trimmings! Oh nevermind. I don't know what possessed me to  go and look
>> at the debug window. But I do and I see the following.
>>
>> GEOM: ad4: the primary GPT table is corrupt or invalid.
>> GEOM: ad4: using the secondary instead -- recovery strongly advised.
>>
>> This is even after zero the beginning and the end of the drive ....
>> Something is hinky!
>>
>
> Today I also found that zeroing the beginning and end of the drive didn't
> seem to be enough.  I had the start of a huffy email about how hard it was
> to calculate the end of a drive in blocks, and how dd didn't have a negative
> oseek to seek backwards from the end.  But then I checked gpart(8)... and it
> turns out that
>
> # gpart destroy -F da0
>
> works.  Be very careful that you've got the right drive there, of course.
>

Fixit# gpart destroy -F /dev/node# says

gpart: illegal option -- F

it would appear that the gpart on the 8.1-RELEASE and 8.2BETA1 images do not
contain this switch and I get pattern not found when I search 'man 8 gpart'
... there is a '-f flags' but no mention of '-F'

C-