Am I getting too old

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 22 Jan 2014, Olivier Nicole wrote:

> in the old times (FreeBSD 8) it took me 5 minutes to partition a disk
> for a test machine: create a couple of MS DOS partitions, install the
> MBR, create FreeBSD partitions, done. It used to be working easily,
> efficiently and reliably.
>
> Now it had been one day since I tried to reproduce that with FreeBSD
> 9, not to avail: I always end up with messaged saying things like
> invalid partition, or stuff like that.
>
> What was the rational behind the decision of breaking something that
> used to work fine (that had been working fine for over 10 years) and
> replace it with something that is ugly, unfriendly (you have to give
> some types to the partitions, but nowhere is it written what type is
> allowed or not) and that is not working?
>
> Oh maybe if I choose to go all by default it will work, but I don't
> want the default, I want to be allowed to make my own choices easily.

Is this about sysinstall versus bsdinstall?  Or fdisk/bsdlabel versus 
gpart?

sysinstall was fine for me, except when it unpredictably overwrote the 
MBR even after being told not to.  sade was, well, the same thing.

For disk partitioning, I find gpart much easier to use than sysinstall, 
sade, fdisk (FreeBSD, Linux, or MS-DOS), bsdlabel, or the partition 
editor in bsdinstall.

Here are my notes on using gpart to set up GPT or MBR/BSDLabel:
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html

There is a separate version for SSDs which has all the steps on a quick 
summary which is also applicable to hard drives:
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/ssd.html