glabel nor tunefs save my labels

[Michael Powell]

Demelier David wrote:

> Hi,
> I was trying to follow this guide to make labels :
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/geom-glabel.html
> 
> It does not work here, I boot single user and ran these commands :
> glabel label usr /dev/ad0s1f
[snip]

If there was older software on the drive previously you might try blanking 
the MBR. I know I had trouble installing 8.0 on a drive that previously had 
6.2 installed on it. Something about the MBR support in 8.0 was different 
and the labels from 6.2 were invisible to it. So when it came time for 
disklabel to write out the labels during the 8.0 install it would fail. This 
is what I did: Boot from a LiveFS CD and execute:

sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adx oseek=1 bs=512 count=1

Replace 'x' in adx with your drive number. If your problem is being caused 
by the same situation I experienced this should take care of it. 

> 
> Do I am missing something? On my other machine it prints a lot of
> GEOM: ad2s1a: geometry does not match label (255h,63s != 16h,255s).
> GEOM: ad2s1c: geometry does not match label (255h,63s != 16h,255s).
> GEOM: ad2s1: geometry does not match label (255h,63s != 16h,255s).
> 
For the most part simply ignore these. Lots of people see them nowadays and 
considered to be cosmetic and harmless. I believe it has something to do the 
drift away from the old MBR DOS compatibility days and the move to newer 
slicing/partitioning schemes. In other words these will eventually 
disappear, but in the meantime are probably a red herring.

-Mike