Problem running fdisk via sysinstall

[Mark Costlow]

Nick, that worked!  I zero'd the whole disk, then everything worked
like normal.

Thanks,

Mark

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 07:15:13PM -0600, Mark Costlow wrote:
> Since I don't have any other ideas yet, I'll give that a try.  I'll
> let you know if it works tomorrow if it has finished by then :-)
> 
> Mark
> 
> On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 07:46:38PM -0400, Nicholas Mills wrote:
> >    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 <[1]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
> >      [2]cheeks at swcp.com | Web:   [3]www.swcp.com | Voice: +1-505-232-7992
> >      [4]abq-strange.com -- Interesting photos taken in Albuquerque, NM
> >                        Last post: Shoe Pole - 2009-07-07 20:18:22
> >      _______________________________________________
> >      [5]freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> >      [6]http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
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> > 
> > References
> > 
> >    1. mailto:cheeks at swcp.com
> >    2. mailto:cheeks at swcp.com
> >    3. http://www.swcp.com/
> >    4. http://abq-strange.com/
> >    5. mailto:freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> >    6. http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> >    7. mailto:freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org
> 
> -- 
> Mark Costlow    | Southwest Cyberport | Fax:   +1-505-232-7975
> cheeks at swcp.com | Web:   www.swcp.com | Voice: +1-505-232-7992
> 
> abq-strange.com -- Interesting photos taken in Albuquerque, NM
>                    Last post: Shoe Pole - 2009-07-07 20:18:22
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-- 
Mark Costlow    | Southwest Cyberport | Fax:   +1-505-232-7975
cheeks at swcp.com | Web:   www.swcp.com | Voice: +1-505-232-7992

abq-strange.com -- Interesting photos taken in Albuquerque, NM
                   Last post: Shoe Pole - 2009-07-07 20:18:22