Disklabe oddity

Guy Van Sanden n.b at myrealbox.com
Sat Sep 20 02:53:43 PDT 2003


Thanks you for your very complete answer Greg


On Sat, 2003-09-20 at 10:59, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> [Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html]
> 
> Output wrapped.
> 
> On Saturday, 20 September 2003 at 10:44:28 +0200, Guy Van Sanden wrote:
> > I get a strange message from disklabel:
<snip>
> > What does this mean?
> 
> Well, as it says, your c partition doesn't start at 0, so it also
> can't cover the whole unit:
> 
>    #      size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
>    c: 78156162       63    unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0*-4864*)
> 
> What part of that don't you understand?
> 
I don't understand how this happened, as I used the sysinstall menus to
lay-out the disk

> > The disk was formatted by the FreeBSD install procedure.
> 
> If you haven't changed anything here, it would be interesting to know
> in more detail just what you did.  To judge by the surprising number
> of partitions, you didn't take the defaults.

I just created seperate partitions for / /tmp /var /usr etc.  The c
partition was created by FreeBSD on its own.
Could this be a BIOS problem, my system BIOS predates that size of disks
by far?

> 
> > The system is an older Digital PC (3500) PII 333 Mhz.
> > The disk is a 40 GB IDE drive (WD)
> >
> > BTW, I'm looking for a safe way to 'grow' my rootfs, I've looked
> > arround before, but I'm still not clear on the right procedure for
> > it.
> 
> Take a look at growfs(8).  To do it right, you need space directly
> behind the root file system.  Even Vinum won't help here.  You could
> move the swap space elsewhere, for example.

I'm looking at that option, lucky that I have a second disk with rsynced
mirrors of all partitions on the first one.  I can just remove /home and
/data and copy them back later.
Perhaps I can add the swap space to / and create a new swap further back
on the disk.

> 
> > I'm considering reinstalling the system with 5.2, reformatting the
> > disk,
> 
> There's seldom a reason either to reinstall or to reformat.  If you
> don't want anything of the current installation, reinstallation may be
> faster, however.
> 
> > but I don't know if this will clear the error.
> 
> You can clear the error by running disklabel -e /dev/ad0s1a in single
> user mode, and changing the length and offset of partition c (offset
> 0, add 63 to the size).

I wanted to try this on the mirror disk first, it also shows the offset
at 63 using disklabel -r
Yet doing disklabel -e on it shows the offset at 0
8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
  a:   327680        0    4.2BSD     2048 16384 20488   # (Cyl.    0 -
325*)
  b:  1007984   327680      swap                        # (Cyl.  325*-
1325*)
  c: 80418177        0    unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 -
79779*)
  d:  1007616  1335664    4.2BSD     2048 16384 62984   # (Cyl. 1325*-
2324*)
  e:  1024000  2343280    4.2BSD     2048 16384 64008   # (Cyl. 2324*-
3340*)
  f: 18120704  3367280    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552   # (Cyl. 3340*-
21317*)
  g: 20971520 21487984    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552   # (Cyl. 21317*-
42122*)
  h: 37958673 42459504    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552   # (Cyl. 42122*-
79779*)


> 
> Greg
> --
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