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

Warren Block wblock at wonkity.com
Fri Jan 7 04:48:25 UTC 2011


On Thu, 6 Jan 2011, Chris Brennan wrote:

> 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
> 
> 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).

destroy -F is supposed to mean "Forced destroying of the partition table 
even if it is not empty."  But compare to this thread on the forum 
earlier today: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=20731

Maybe -F isn't quite as brutal as it needs to be.

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

GPT does seem to be tenacious, and I'm wondering if maybe there's 
something left in RAM that's written back to the disk on shutdown.

> 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.

I would just boot the install CD, enter q and the fdisk screen, enter 
the mountpoints and q at the label screen, and let it do the rest.


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