can't make an 'a' slice except with auto-defaults

Garance A Drosihn drosih at rpi.edu
Tue Feb 9 21:14:24 UTC 2010


At 7:59 PM -0700 2/2/10, Steve Franks wrote:
>On a running system.  I mean, I know I should quit being a &%^#& and
>read the manpage for bsdlabel, but sysintall really does have a nice
>tui.    'C'reate slice goes straight to 'd', even on a 'fresh' disk.
>I see in the handbook, this is alluded to, but some intermediate level
>between begginer and expert (bsdlabel just strikes me as way too easy
>to trash the disk I'm running off of while trying to make a backup),
>would be nice...512M just won't fit the kernel+symbols.


If you're running into the issue that I think you're running into,
then there is a way to trick sysinstall to do what you want.

When you ask sysinstall to create that first partition, claim that
you are creating the partition named '/'.  If you do that, it will
put the partition in as "a".  You couldn't actually partition it as
'/', of course, because that would conflict with '/' on your
running system.  But sysinstall will let you say you want to create
'/', and then use "a" for that partition.

Then select that "a" partition, and tell sysinstall you want to
change the name for that partition.  Change it to whatever you
want.  At that point sysinstall can't change the partition from "a"
to "d", so you'll have the mount-point that you really want as the
"a" partition.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu


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