Geom question

[William A. Mahaffey III]

On 10/02/15 15:31, Chad J. Milios wrote:
>> On Oct 2, 2015, at 3:41 PM, William A. Mahaffey III <wam at hiwaay.net> wrote:
>>
>> I am prepping to provision 2 boxen w/ FreeBSD 9.3R, preferably from a thumb drive. I would like to add a 'utils' directory w/ some scripts I wrote to automate the partitioning/slicing of the HDD's (2X on 1 box, 8X on the other), & also accumulate output from the install process in case questions arise. To that end, I am planning on partitioning/slicing a thumb drive, prepping it to be bootable following examples on the gpart man page, & copying verbatim stuff from the memstick.img for 9.3R that I downloaded a while back, as well as adding my utils directory. Reading up on gpart & geom raises 1 question: can I do all these preps on a disk image file I create w/ dd, or do i do them in place on the target memstick, then dd the results onto an on-disk image for safekeeping ? Put another way, can a disk image created by dd be a 'geom' for gpart ? TIA & have a good one.
>>
>> -- 
>>
>>     William A. Mahaffey III
> In a way, yes. `mdconfig -f filename` will make your file accessible as a virtual device.
>

Thanks for the info. I proceeded w/ trying to setup /dev/md0 as a 
bootable disk image as follows:

[root at kabini1, /etc, 3:54:31pm] 758 % dd if=/dev/zero 
of=/home/memstick.img count=3699 bs=1m
3699+0 records in
3699+0 records out
3878682624 bytes transferred in 8.324621 secs (465929036 bytes/sec)
[root at kabini1, /etc, 3:55:23pm] 759 % cat 
~wam/FreeBSD/9.3/README.createBootableMBR-SD.txt

      MBR:   Master Boot Record is used on PCs and removable media. Requires
             the GEOM_PART_MBR kernel option.  The GEOM_PART_EBR option adds
             support for the Extended Boot Record (EBR), which is used to
             define a logical partition.  The GEOM_PART_EBR_COMPAT option
             enables backward compatibility for partition names in the EBR
             scheme.  It also prevents any type of actions on such 
partitions.

      Create an MBR scheme on ada0, then create a 30GB-sized FreeBSD 
slice, mark it active and install the boot0 boot manager:

            /sbin/gpart create -s MBR ada0
            /sbin/gpart add -t freebsd -s 30G ada0
            /sbin/gpart set -a active -i 1 ada0
            /sbin/gpart bootcode -b /boot/boot0 ada0

      Now create a BSD scheme (BSD label) with space for up to 20 
partitions:

            /sbin/gpart create -s BSD -n 20 ada0s1

      Create a 1GB-sized UFS partition and a 4GB-sized swap partition:

            /sbin/gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -s 1G ada0s1
            /sbin/gpart add -t freebsd-swap -s 4G ada0s1

      Install bootstrap code for the BSD label:

            /sbin/gpart bootcode -b /boot/boot ada0s1

[root at kabini1, /etc, 3:55:50pm] 760 % mdconfig -f /home/memstick.img
md0
[root at kabini1, /etc, 3:56:26pm] 761 % /sbin/gpart create -s MBR md0
md0 created
[root at kabini1, /etc, 3:58:45pm] 762 % /sbin/gpart add -t freebsd -s 
3698M md0
md0s1 added
[root at kabini1, /etc, 3:59:14pm] 763 % /sbin/gpart set -a active -i 1 md0
active set on md0s1
[root at kabini1, /etc, 3:59:25pm] 764 % /sbin/gpart bootcode -b 
/boot/boot0 md0
bootcode written to md0
[root at kabini1, /etc, 3:59:44pm] 765 % /sbin/gpart create -s BSD md0s1
md0s1 created
[root at kabini1, /etc, 3:59:57pm] 766 % /sbin/gpart add -t freebsd-ufs md0s1
md0s1a added
[root at kabini1, /etc, DING!] 767 % /sbin/gpart bootcode -b /boot/boot md0s1
bootcode written to md0s1
[root at kabini1, /etc, 4:00:25pm] 768 % lltr /dev/md0*; date
crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0xd2 Oct  2 15:56 /dev/md0
crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0xd5 Oct  2 15:59 /dev/md0s1
crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0xd6 Oct  2 16:00 /dev/md0s1a
Fri Oct  2 16:00:44 MCDT 2015
[root at kabini1, /etc, 4:00:44pm] 769 % mount /dev/md0s1  /media/sd/
mount: /dev/md0s1: Invalid argument
[root at kabini1, /etc, 4:01:16pm] 770 % mount -t ufs /dev/md0s1 /media/sd/
mount: /dev/md0s1: Invalid argument
[root at kabini1, /etc, 4:01:34pm] 771 % mount -t ufs /dev/md0s1a /media/sd/
mount: /dev/md0s1a: Invalid argument
[root at kabini1, /etc, 4:01:41pm] 772 %

& I appear to be stuck trying to mount the /dev/md0 device so I can copy 
stuff to it :-/. Any clues appreciated. TIA & have a good one.

-- 

	William A. Mahaffey III

  ----------------------------------------------------------------------

	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
	 ever devised by man."
                            -- Gen. George S. Patton Jr.