Dangerously dedicated mode with FreeBSD 10.1

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 11/22/14 06:15, Rostislav Krasny wrote:
> 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.

It isn't meant to provide partitioning at the level of detail where you 
are specifying the start position in blocks. Why do you need that? If 
you want that, gpart at the command line is a much better tool. You can 
tell bsdinstall to use previously created partitions, of course, and you 
can also specify partition sizes to arbitrary precision. If you want 
sub-GB partitioning, specify the size in MB, or KB, or blocks. You are 
free to do any of these things.

> 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.
>
It can use an already partitioned disk, which seems to be your problem 
here in fact. Like the partition editor in every other OS, it assumes 
that if you just specify the mount point for a partition, you don't want 
to erase it. Erasing existing partitions is an extremely unfriendly 
thing to do. You can re-initialize it by changing any non-mountpoint 
property of the partition or from the command line.
-Nathan