Getting useful diagnostics from geom(8) and friends

[Garrett Cooper]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 3:36 PM, Rick C. Petty
<rick-freebsd2009 at kiwi-computer.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 03:25:07PM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>> On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 3:02 PM, Rick C. Petty
>> >
>> > I'm not sure what you're doing wrong.  Do the following steps work?
>> >
>> > % gpart create -s MBR /dev/ad4
>> > % gpart bootcode -b /boot/boot0 /dev/ad4
>> > % gpart add -b 34 -s 128 -t freebsd /dev/ad4
>> > % gpart bootcode -p /boot/gptboot -i 1 /dev/ad0
>>
>> I didn't run #4 (don't want gptboot on the appliance), but all of the
>> steps failed.
>
> Then how do you boot into FreeBSD?  You need to install the boot blocks or
> the loader(8) won't boot.

We netboot :).

>> fdisk doesn't like these Western Digital drives for some whacky reason
>> when I specify fdisk -BIq /dev/ad4, etc... and only after I go in and
>
> What exactly do you mean by "doesn't like"?

Sorry... should have included that detail... it's an on-and-off issue
where sometimes the drives do properly slice themselves and sometimes
they don't. Not sure why it's so twitchy...

%fdisk -BIq /dev/ad4
******* Working on device /dev/ad4 *******
fdisk: invalid fdisk partition table found
%ls /dev/ad4*
/dev/ad4	/dev/ad4s1

-Garrett