sade(8) on a gmirror device

[Richard Tector]

A little background - the system in question , running 7.2-RELEASE has 2 
1TB disks in a gmirror, ez0. ad4 and ad6 are the two providers for the 
gmirror device. It was created after a 30GB slice had been created on 
ad4 for the various system partitions required.
This system is running fine, with the partitions mounted from 
/dev/mirror/ez0s1a for example.

What I would now like to do is create a second slice from the remaining 
900-odd GB left on the mirror. However, sade (and sysinstall) do not 
display the ez0 device to operate on, only the providers: ad4 and ad6.

fdisk(8) will happily read the partition table from the mirror:

******* Working on device /dev/mirror/ez0 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=121601 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=121601 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)

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 62914257 (30719 Meg), flag 80 (active)
         beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
         end: cyl 1023/ head 15/ sector 63
The data for partition 2 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
<UNUSED>


However, dumping the partition table and passing back to fdisk also fails:

ezekiel# fdisk -f fd.e
******* Working on device /dev/mirror/ez0 *******

fdisk: Geom not found: "ez0"
fdisk: Failed to write sector zero

This also occurs if I set kern.geom.debugflags to 16, by the way.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to proceed? The only method I 
can think of is to break the mirror, add the slice to ad4, then recreate 
the mirror. Not being able to use sade on a gmirror is a real PITA.

Regards,

Richard
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 2697 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20090624/edcfc986/smime.bin