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

[Chris Brennan]

GMail threadding don't fail me now!

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 4:54 AM, Adam Vande More <amvandemore at gmail.com>wrote:

> This is a pretty easy problem to replicate if you are pressing W, and that
> "issue" has existed for quite some time.  If you press W then Q at
> sysinstall fdisk then attempt to force write disklabel screens you will get
> the error.  Just setup the slices and partitions as you want and let
> sysinstall handle the writing of information.  There is a big warning box
> that says not to use force write except under certain conditions and this is
> not one of them.
>
> If you google the error message in the OP, the first result is:
>
> http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1675
>
>
>
pressing 'W' was a last resort option, by no means was I starting off that
way.


>  Failing that, I can't see other than a hardware issue, unless somehow
>> sysinstall is broken and you may do better manually running fdisk and
>> bsdlabel and newfs per Handbook and manuals?
>>
>
>  This doesn't say hardware error to me at all, at least not a disk hardware
> issue.  The message was present across two disks, and if there truly is a
> problem writing to the media a complete zeroing of the drive would be
> apparent then.
>
>
No, only one disk.


> While we're getting people to look at sysinstall and the auto resizing, it
> would be nice to get the "Unable to create the partition.  Too big?" issue
> resolved.  You can trigger this by auto-sizing the partitions, deleting a
> couple and recreating one that a different size than one autosize
> suggested.  Then create the second partion using the auto-populated value in
> partition size box.  Typically run into this when making / a little bigger
> on amd64 installs by borrowing some space from /usr.  It's very tedious to
> slowly decrease the size of the second partition in your attempts to create
> it if you're trying to utilize the whole drive.
>
>
> --
> Adam Vande More
>