adding a second hard drive

[Lowell Gilbert]

Dave Webster <dwebman at telus.net> writes:

> To solve a problem I'm having with /var running out of space, I decided
> to add a second hard drive.
> 
> I found info at freebsd.org on adding disks using sysinstall and
> followed the advice.  The old disk is a Maxtor 6Y080L0 80G as ad0 and
> the new disk is a Maxtor 6Y120P0 as ad3.  I ran sysinstall, chose ad3
> and parition it with: / 512M, /swap 2G, /tmp 3G, /var 4G, /usr
> 30G, /data 76G.  Did an installation with Kern source and documentation.
> Added a new user, and set a password for root.  I added the FreeBSD boot
> manager.
> 
> I rebooted to ad0 (didn't have the FreeBSD boot manager on this drive
> yet), and found I could no longer login as the regular user and that my
> root password was the one I had just set up on ad3.  I adduser my old
> login and assigned it the original ID and got back the settings in my
> home directory, although I don't know what I've doen to the
> configuration files in /etc.
> 
> I tried to put the FreeBSD boot manager on ad0 with:
> boot0cfg -B ad0 but get an erro:
> boot0cfg: open /de/ad0: no such file or directory
> 
> I've googled this problem but have found little help except that it
> shouldn't happen and it should be reported.
> 
> I'm running FreeBSD 5.4 stable.  I'm temped to start over from scratch
> but would hate to lose everythin on ad0 without first transferring it to
> ad3.  I've tried to mount ad3 and ad3c (the only references to ad3
> in /dev) using:
> mount /dev/ad3 /mnt/bigdrive but get an error:
> mount: /dev/ad3 on /mnt/bigdrive: incorrect super block
> 
> So I'm pretty lost.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.  I've spent
> 4-5 hrs googling for solutions but nothing seems to work.

It sure *sounds* like you accidentally did your install to the old
disk instead of the new one.  If that is the case, then your old data
are indeed lost -- overwritten with the new install.

Also, it sounds like you were following the advice for moving your
whole system to the new disk, whereas the advice for *adding* the new
disk to the old one would have been more appropriate.  That's the
"disk formatting tutorial" article in the documentation collection.