Problem running fdisk via sysinstall

[Nicholas Mills]

Mark,

I'm certainly no expert, but I think I can point you in the right direction.
The system appears to be attempting to read from a GPT stored on the disk
from when you used it on Linux. I'm not sure of the specifics, but I do know
that some GPT info is stored near the end of the drive. The easy (but slow)
solution would be to use dd to write zeros to the entire drive (da1).

Hope this helps,

Nick

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 7:28 PM, Mark Costlow <cheeks at swcp.com> wrote:

> I hope this question isn't too stupid.
>
> I have a machine with a 3Ware RAID card, with 4 SATA drives attached.
>
> 2 drives are 250GB in a RAID1 volume, and act as the boot disk with
> a standard freebsd partiction map (/, /var, /usr, and swap on this disk).
>
> The other 2 drives are 1TB in a RAID1 volume, intended to be mounted
> as a separate data partition.  At boot both volumes are recognized:
>
> Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da0 at twa0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
> Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da0: <AMCC 9550SX-4LP DISK 3.08> Fixed Direct
> Access SCSI-5 device
> Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da0: 100.000MB/s transfers
> Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da0: 238408MB (488259584 512 byte sectors:
> 255H 63S/T 30392C)
> Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da1 at twa0 bus 0 target 1 lun 0
> Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da1: <AMCC 9550SX-4LP DISK 3.08> Fixed Direct
> Access SCSI-5 device
> Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da1: 100.000MB/s transfers
> Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da1: 953664MB (1953103872 512 byte sectors:
> 255H 63S/T 121575C)
>
> da0 is fine, and the system boots off of it with no problem.
>
> When I try to add da1 to the system, I get the following:
>
> * Run systinstall, Configure, Fdisk, select da1
> * Get the friendly warning about the large geometry, click "Yes"
> * Hit "A" to use entire disk.  Hit "W" to save, click "Yes",
> select "None" for boot record.
> * Fdisk says: "Wrote FDISK partition information out successfully."
> * Per handbook, get out of sysinstall and re-run it, then
> try to Label.  In the label editor, it knows nothing about
> da1 (the device can be selected when going into the label
> editor, but I can't create any partitions).
>
> At the time when Fdisk says "Wrote FDISK partition information out,
> successfully." this gets logged to /var/log/messages:
>
> Jun 23 17:11:18 ebi7 kernel: GEOM: da1: corrupt or invalid GPT detected.
> Jun 23 17:11:18 ebi7 kernel: GEOM: da1: GPT rejected -- may not be
> recoverable.
>
>
> I've tried several variations, including running the command-line
> equivalents, but keep hitting this same error (fdisk thinks everything
> is good, but the GPT error is logged).  I've also noticed that
> /dev/da1 exists, but there is no /dev/da1s1 or /dev/da1s1e ... I'm
> not sure when those should get created.
>
> And the final possibly-relevant tidbit: these drives used to be
> part of a different RAID on a linux system.  They've been re-initialized
> into the RAID card on this system, and I've zero'd the first 1k of
> the volume with dd, so I don't *think* that should be a factor.
> I've worked with about a dozen systems with the same hardware in
> the configuration outlined above and haven't seen this problem
> before.  But I'm usually using fresh new disks so maybe it matters.
>
> I've googled this issue and found several people reporting similar
> symptoms over the years, but haven't found any posted solutions
> aside from telling people to read geom(8).
>
> Any hints or clue-by-fours?
>
> Mark
> --
> Mark Costlow    | Southwest Cyberport | Fax:   +1-505-232-7975
> cheeks at swcp.com | Web:   www.swcp.com | Voice: +1-505-232-7992
>
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