On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 8:18 AM, Jerry McAllister <jerr...@msu.edu> wrote: > On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 07:59:15PM -0700, Steve Franks wrote: > >> On a running system. I mean, I know I should quit being a &%^#& and >> read the manpage for bsdlabel, but sysintall really does have a nice >> tui. 'C'reate slice goes straight to 'd', even on a 'fresh' disk. >> I see in the handbook, this is alluded to, but some intermediate level >> between begginer and expert (bsdlabel just strikes me as way too easy >> to trash the disk I'm running off of while trying to make a backup), >> would be nice...512M just won't fit the kernel+symbols. >> >> <fuming, reading man bsdlabel ;) > > > Well, Create slice would be an fdisk(8) thing, not bsdlabel. > bsdlabel creates partitions within a slice. > > But, generally you cannot run fdisk on a disk that is in use on a > running system - which generally means that it is the boot device, > has filesystems mounted or has part of the currently designated swap > space. You will need to plug in a boot cd or bring up the fixit system > for that. The fixit system runs from memory - creates filesystems > and mount points in memory rather than on disk, so it can talk to > any disk. > > New, if you are working on a non-used (extra) disk, eg one that is not > the boot device nor has any mounted filesystems or swap space > on it, then you should be able to fdisk and bsdlabel that from > a running system. > > I have no idea what you mean by "'C'reate slice goes straight to 'd'" > It does not match anything I remember being possible. I don't happen > to have any system handy at the moment that I can muck with disks on. > > ////jerry
Ok, terminology crash. As someone pointed out, I'm talking about label, here, not fdisk, and partitions, not slices (had those two backwards in my head). Basically, as far as I can tell, on a running system, there is no combination of keystrokes in sysinstall's label editor that will create an "ad[1-9]s1a", except the 'a' key which produces a 512M s1a. All other keystrokes (namely 'c') go straight to "ad[1-9]s1d" when a second disk is placed in a system booted from ad0s1a. I'm just trying to make a fresh disk ready for dump/restore with a 1G /, so I guess sysinstall is out as an option at this time. Steve _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"