formatting hardrive

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> Hi !
> 
> Ok, I'm at a point where I'm ready to cry :(
> Is there ANY easy way to partition/slice a hardrive for FreeBSD ?????
> I spent all morning playing with bsdlabel, sysinstall... I just want to 
> partition a second hardrive so I could dump/restore the content of my first 
> drive.
> So, I tried sysinstall post-install tools to create the slices and all, but 
> all I get are errors like "can't write to ad2", or "can't mount /dev/ad2s1a 
> on /mnt" ....
> Basically what I want is:
> ad2s1a --> /mnt
> ad2s1b --> SWAP
> ad2s1d --> /mnt/tmp
> ad2s1e --> /mnt/var
> ad2s1f --> /mnt/usr
> 
> So, all I have to do after is dump / --> /mnt, /tmp --> /mnt/tmp ... and so 
> on.
> I sware I tried all morning without any kind of success :(
> 
> I would really appreciate some help.

Well, although /stand/sysinstall would do it OK, it might be just
as easy to use fdisk and disklabel directly.   I don't know anything
about 'bsdlabel'.

So, presuming your extra disk is really /dev/ad2 (are there ad0 and ad1?)
do the following.

   fdisk -BI ad2              (makes one big slice on the disk)

   disklabel -w -r da0s1 auto   (writes an initial label for slice 1)

   disklabel -r -e da0s1        (now edit the label to make the partitions)
       this will bring up the label for slice1 in an editor - vi unless
       you specify another one.    Edit the partition table as needed.
       Make it something like this only with the sizes you need.
       You didn't mention sizes so this example is for a nominal 18GB drive
       with 512 MB for a: /mnt,  
            1GB for b: swap, 
            512 MB for e: /mnt/tmp,
            1 GB for f: /mnt/var 
            and all the rest for g: /mnt/usr
       NOTES: - The size is specified in number of 512 byte blocks
              - Recent versions of disklabel (at least since 4.6.2 FreeBSD)
                allow you to put a * for offset and it calculates it for you
              - and a * for size in the last partition specified tells it to 
                use all rest of the slice for that partition.
       By convention, partition b: is used for swap, c: is a comment used to
       specify the whole slice and d: is not used for regular file systems.
      
       - Don't change the header stuff, just the partition size stuff.
    
8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
  a:  1048576        0    4.2BSD     1024  8192    22   #
  b:  2097152        *    swap       1024  8192    22   # 
  c: 35551782        0    unused        0     0         #
  e:  1048576        *    4.2BSD     1024  8192    22   #
  f:  2097152        *    swap       1024  8192    22   # 
  g:        *        *    4.2BSD     2048 16384    89   #

When you :wq out of the edit session, it will write the label.

Now, you have to newfs each of the partitions except for swap.
Probably just take the defaults for newfs.   
   
   newfs /dev/ad2s1a
   newfs /dev/ad2s1e
   newfs /dev/ad2s1f
   newfs /dev/ad2s1g

Now mount partition a on /mnt so you can make the mount points for
the rest of the partitions.    (By the way, I would suggest making
up a different mount point than /mnt because there are some other 
things like to mess with that so you might make up something like /dmp
by doing   mkdir /dmp,  then replace /mnt with /dmp in all these commands)

   mount /dev/ad2s1a /mnt          (or mount /dev/ad2s1a /dmp)
   cd /mnt                         (or cd /dmp)
   mkdir tmp
   mkdir var
   mkdir usr

Now edit fstab to add the following entries

   # Disk ad2
   /dev/ad2s1a          /mnt         ufs     rw       2       2
   /dev/ad2s1b          none         swap    rw       0       0
   /dev/ad2s1e          /mnt/tmp     ufs     rw       2       2
   /dev/ad2s1f          /mnt/var     ufs     rw       2       2
   /dev/ad2s1g          /mnt/usr     ufs     rw       2       2

Alternatatively, if you use /dmp for a mount point it would look like:

   # Disk ad2
   /dev/ad2s1a          /dmp         ufs     rw       2       2
   /dev/ad2s1b          none         swap    rw       0       0
   /dev/ad2s1e          /dmp/tmp     ufs     rw       2       2
   /dev/ad2s1f          /dmp/var     ufs     rw       2       2
   /dev/ad2s1g          /dmp/usr     ufs     rw       2       2

Now, just mount everything.   
In the future it will all be mounted at boot time.

   mount -a

And you are done.

By the way.  Don't try to dump to the mounted directory.
 eg DO NOT    dump -0f /dmp/var /var
Instead, you must name a file in the directory.
              dump -0f /dmp/var/var.backup /var

Given this, I don't see why you really want to make all those 
partions in the slice.  

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Just make the slice with fdisk as I described and then use disklabel 
to create just one large partition to hold the dump files.   
So, the disklabel partition table would look something like:

8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
  b:  2097152        0    swap       1024  8192    22   #
  c: 35551782        0    unused        0     0         #
  e:        *        *    4.2BSD     2048 16384    89   #

Then you would only need to create the /dmp mount point:
   mkdir /dmp

Add to /etc/fstab the following:

   # Disk ad2
   /dev/ad2s1b          none         swap    rw       0       0
   /dev/ad2s1e          /dmp         ufs     rw       2       2

Mount it with:

   mount -a

and do dumps to files /dmp/root.backup   (eg: dump -0f /dmp/root.backup /)
                      /dmp/tmp.backup    (eg: dump -0f /dmp/tmp.backup /tmp)
                      /dmp/var.backup    (eg: dump -0f /dmp/var.backup /var)
                      /dmp/usr.backup    (eg: dump -0f /usr/var.backup /usr)
That way you don't have to outguess how big each separate partition for
each dump needs to be.   

Also, it is very unusual to back up /tmp since it is supposed to be
only temporary, sort of scratch space.  But, that is up to you.

////jerry

> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> -- 
> Antoine Jacoutot
> ajacoutot at lphp.org
> http://www.lphp.org
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>