GEOM label clarification

[PJ]

Manolis Kiagias wrote:
> PJ wrote:
>   
>> Manolis Kiagias wrote:
>>   
>>     
>>> PJ wrote:
>>>   
>>>     
>>>       
>>>> If I understand correctly from the manual, giving the labels their slice
>>>> name (/dev/label/rootfs rather than /dev/ad4s1a) will assure that
>>>> regardless of the disk, the boot will be from the disk being booted and
>>>> not from another disk as happened to me recently - the fstab on disk ad4
>>>> was referncing ad12 so the boot was from ad12 rather than ad4.
>>>> The handbook says:
>>>> "By permanently labeling the partitions on the boot disk, the system
>>>> should be able to continue to boot normally, even if the disk is moved
>>>> to another controller or transferred to a different system. For this
>>>> example, it is assumed that a single ATA disk is used, which is
>>>> currently recognized by the system as ad0."
>>>> If the disk is moved to another system, it may no longer be ad0... So
>>>> will it still boot correctly?
>>>>
>>>>   
>>>>     
>>>>       
>>>>         
>>> In short, yes. I do this routinely all the time.
>>> Assuming of course that the device is connected to a controller that
>>> FreeBSD recognizes.
>>> This should be a non-issue for standard ATA/SATA disks.
>>>
>>>   
>>>     
>>>       
>>>> Or should the ufsid labels be used?
>>>>
>>>>   
>>>>     
>>>>       
>>>>         
>>> The ufsid is also an option if you do not wish to create the labels
>>> yourself.
>>> The advantage of user-created labels is that they are not 'cryptic' like
>>> the ufsid ones
>>> and you may actually remember them :)
>>>
>>>   
>>>     
>>>       
>>>> Will both of these contortions work?
>>>>   
>>>>     
>>>>       
>>>>         
>>> Yes, both will do.
>>>
>>>   
>>>     
>>>       
>> Thanks for the reassurance. Now to start labelling. Uh.. I guess that
>> means that if I label 1 disk and then clone it to several others, they
>> wil  all work from any system... Well, I guess I'll try it. Thanks again.
>>
>>
>>   
>>     
> How are going to clone it? Will the clone also  copy the labels?
> For example, if doing a dump / restore (which I often do) I recreate the
> partitions manually, newfs them, label them and then restore the
> contents. In many cases I use a live (Fixit) system for this.
>   
I'm looking into that just now.
I am playing with two disks... one is 80gb sata on USB... and the second
is 250Gb sata on USB.
I had tried to set them up with livefs but the 80Gb is all wrong... I
usually set up 2Gb on /, 3Gb on swap, 2gb on /tmp, 2gb on /var and 50gb
on /usr . But I just newfsd the partitions on the 80gb and found that
the da0s1d was 50gb which doesn't make sense as I had set it for 2gb and
d should have been /tmp, e = /var, f= usr and g=/home. That explains why
I ran out of space when trying to restore to the disk.
So now I'm going to try to redo the disk manually with fdisk, bsdlabel
and newfs. We'll see...