"gpart add" falsely claiming "No space left on device"
Warren Block
wblock at wonkity.com
Wed Sep 7 12:46:25 UTC 2016
On Tue, 6 Sep 2016, Perry Hutchison wrote:
> Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, 6 Sep 2016, Perry Hutchison wrote:
>>> I copied the 10.3-RELEASE memstick.img to a 4GB flash drive, then
>>> used "gpart recover" to resize the partition table to the media.
>>> After that "gpart show" reports:
>>>
>>> # gpart show da2
>>> => 3 7811067 da2 GPT (3.7G)
>>> 3 32 1 freebsd-boot (16K)
>>> 35 1348832 2 freebsd-ufs (659M)
>>> 1348867 2048 3 freebsd-swap (1.0M)
>>> 1350915 6460155 - free - (3.1G)
>>>
>>> but "gpart add" refuses to add a second freebsd-ufs partition in
>>> that supposedly-free space:
>>>
>>> # gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -l pkgs -f x da2
>>> gpart: index '4': No space left on device
>>>
>>> # gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -l pkgs -f x -b 1350915 -s 6460155 da2
>>> gpart: index '4': No space left on device
>>
>> The second one makes more sense, as the first '-f x' would/should
>> have allocated that space (in an uncommitted operation). Don't know
>> about the first one, unless you have tried it before.
>
> It gave that result the very first time, and a subsequent "gpart show"
> produced the same output as before. I tried the second in case the
> reason for the first failing was that (absent -b and -s) it defaulted
> to trying to define a partition covering the whole device, failing
> because the device was not empty.
>
>> Why bother with '-f x'? Why not just do the operation immediately?
>
> Paranoia. IIUC, uncommitted operations work for all purposes
> except surviving a reboot, in particular a subsequent "gpart show",
> but without writing anything to the stick in the (likely) event that
> I did something wrong that would corrupt the stick if committed.
> (I do not pretend to understand gpart, and I've been finding its
> manpage horribly terse.)
Really? I find gpart to be a model of clarity, at least in comparison
to fdisk and other older tools. What does the man page need? More
examples?
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html
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