failed to create gmirror with the handbook instructions

[Andy Zammy]

I tried creating the mirror before the install. As the drives are now
mirrored, the installer picked up on the face that there are two gm0 nodes
- one on each hard drive. I installed onto ada0's gm0 node.

After it reboots, the bootloader stops at the manual prompt. From what I
can see that's not dissapeared up the screen, it tried and failed to mount
from mirror/gm0s1a with error 19. I had to mount from ada0s1a in order for
the boot to get further, but as it's been installed to boot from gm0s1x, it
stops after it mounts /.

After having checked my partition setup many times at this point, I know
for a fact there's a rather large 500MB section free at the end of my hard
drives with this partition set up. Is there any reason I can't just install
as normal, do a 'gmirror label gm0 ada0', and then do a 'gmirror insert gm0
ada1', before changing my fstab to use mirror/gm0? I can't see why dumping
and restoring is necessary, it's just manually doing what gmirror is there
for in the first place. Correct me if I'm wrong :)


On 9 October 2013 00:11, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 8 Oct 2013, Andy Zammy wrote:
>
>  # gpart show ada0s1
>> gpart: No such geom: ada0s1
>>
>> By the way, this is after a restart of the machine.
>>
>> There's nothing to back up, I'm installing a fresh os, so I just install
>> on one drive, plug the other in, and start following the handbook
>> instructions for this method. So the only
>> thing in loader.conf is geom_mirror_load="YES".
>>
>> I'll rephrase the question: given that the handbook originally wanted me
>> to dump from ada0s1 to the mounted mirror/gm0s1 (which was ada1 at the
>> time), and I cannot do this, would it be
>> enough to dump from mirror/gm0s1 (which is what ada0 is now mounted as),
>> to ada1s1 (even though this *should* be the other way around, it's
>> equivalent as far as i can see, isn't it?)?
>>
>
> There is not much point in dumping from the mirror to another drive. The
> dump/restore is how the single drive is copied to the mirror.
>
> On a fresh install, use the Shell mode of the installer to set up the
> mirror, then install directly to it.  There are some instructions on
> mountpoints in the bsdinstall man page.  This will avoid the lag of waiting
> for the second drive to sync.
>