a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop

[Chris Brennan]

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 7 Jan 2011, Ian Smith wrote:
>
>  Manual fdisk & bsdlabel & newfs would confirm that or otherwise, but Chris
>> will have to hunt up mans, docs and howtos on doing that himself, they're
>> out there.
>>
>
> Aha! http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html<http://www.wonkity.com/%7Ewblock/docs/html/disksetup.html>
>
> May/may not be helpful, but the price is right.  Feedback welcome.
>

Can I bow at your feet?!? This gave me just enough of a clue to go back and
arbitraility pass 'gpart delete -i 1 ad4' which actually deleted a
partition! I then zeroed the first 73 and the last 33 blocks of the drive.
fdisk still complained about 'Class not found' which I googled and found to
be an artifact of gpart(8).

So my question is this now, once gpart has touched a disk, does it have the
partition-aids now?

Moving on, I then continued the standard process listed by your link,
bsdlabel'd my layout and saved it, when I do an 'ls -lsga /dev | grep ad4' I
see that I have partitions a,b,d,e,f and I was able to newfs each one of
them

Next question, from this point (at the fixit prompt) can I preform a manual
install of just base? if I can get the system installed at this point then
all should be good when I reboot.