Dangerously dedicated mode with FreeBSD 10.1

[Rostislav Krasny]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 6:51 PM, Nathan Whitehorn
<nwhitehorn at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> On 11/21/14 07:26, Warren Block wrote:
>> If you are determined, it should be possible to select a bsdlabel-only
>> format with the Manual partitioning option in the menus, or enter Shell mode
>> on startup and create it with gpart or even bsdlabel.  That said, I can't
>> think of any advantages of using a bare bsdlable at all.  With 10.1, GPT is
>> available, supports large disks, and is easily alignable.*
>
>
> Right, just select "BSD" as the partition type.

Yes it works.

Unfortunately disk partitioning of bsdinstall(8) isn't precise and
isn't informative. Disk partitioning by sysinstall(8) was much better
in this sense. With bsdinstall(8) I don't see how much disk space is
left unpartitioned and where. Also I don't see where partitions start
and what are their sizes in LBA units of measurement. By default
bsdinstall(8) offers one huge partition for the root mount and a few
hundreds of megabytes for swap partition after the root one. If don't
like the offered partition sizes and want to create the same
partitions manually (with slightly different sizes) I can't do it
because of the precision flaw. Defining the root partitions in GB
units with a size close to the whole disk size doesn't left any free
space for the small swap partition. And if I create a swap partition
before the root one I get an unbootable system.

Another problem with bsdinstall(8) partitioning is an inability of
using already partitioned disk. This is what I've tried first. In this
case I was need to define the mount points of the existing partitions.
It's easy to do (since I have a backup of my previous /etc/fstab) but
then bsdinstall(8) didn't ask me if I want to re-format those
partitions. Then the whole installation failed at the beginning of
base.txz extracting (the first txz package). I'm almost sure it failed
because it tried to extract the base.txz over existing filesystem of
my previous FreeBSD 7.4 system.