Hello, I'm trying to set up a vinum mirrored plex on my 4.7-STABLE (cvsup-ed as of yesterday, 1/3) system. I have 3 30GB drives. Currently, only the first disk is being used. This disk has all the system along with all my digital photos and videos. I'd like to mirror the other two 30GB drives and move the digital photos and videos there, so that if one drive were to die, I'd still have these important pictures and videos.
There is one (I hope) bit of strangeness about this system. I was initially using a Promise FastTrack 100 (pdc20267 chip) card. Since I was having problems with this, I recently got a cheap Maxtor adapter card. This Maxtor card looks to be a relabeled Promise card with the pdc20269 chip. The problem below is the same, regardless of which card is used. The system disk is connected to channel one on the card. The other two disks are master and slave on channel two. This is what FreeBSD shows on boot: ============================== atapci1: <Promise TX2 ATA133 controller> port 0xe800-0xe80f,0xe400-0xe403,0xe000-0xe007,0xdc00-0xdc03,0xd800-0xd807 mem 0xd5800000-0xd5803fff irq 11 at device 15.0 on pci0 ata2: at 0xd800 on atapci1 ata3: at 0xe000 on atapci1 [snip] ar0: 29314MB <ATA RAID0 array> [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: 0 READY ad4: 29314MB <IBM-DTLA-307030> [59560/16/63] at ata2-master UDMA100 ar1: 29314MB <ATA RAID0 array> [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: 0 READY ad6: 29314MB <IBM-DTLA-307030> [59560/16/63] at ata3-master UDMA100 ar2: 29314MB <ATA RAID0 array> [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: 0 READY ad7: 29314MB <IBM-DTLA-307030> [59560/16/63] at ata3-slave UDMA100 ============================== I used /stand/sysinstall to create a slice on each of the mirror disks and to label each with one huge partition. It newfs-ed them and mounted them. ============================== /dev/ar1s1e on /v1 (ufs, local, soft-updates) /dev/ar2s1e on /v2 (ufs, local, soft-updates) ============================== I have read that the next step involves using disklabel to edit the label of each disk and change the "4.2BSD" fstype to "vinum". I wanted to see the labels first, so I typed "disklabel ar1" and it showed me: ============================== # /dev/ar1c: type: ESDI disk: ar1s1 label: flags: bytes/sector: 512 sectors/track: 63 tracks/cylinder: 255 sectors/cylinder: 16065 cylinders: 3736 sectors/unit: 60034842 rpm: 3600 interleave: 1 trackskew: 0 cylinderskew: 0 headswitch: 0 # milliseconds track-to-track seek: 0 # milliseconds drivedata: 0 8 partitions: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] c: 60034842 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 3736*) e: 60034842 0 4.2BSD 2048 16384 89 # (Cyl. 0 - 3736*) ============================== The strangeness starts with ar2: ============================== # /dev/ar2: type: unknown disk: amnesiac label: fictitious flags: bytes/sector: 512 sectors/track: 63 tracks/cylinder: 255 sectors/cylinder: 16065 cylinders: 3737 sectors/unit: 60036417 rpm: 3600 interleave: 1 trackskew: 0 cylinderskew: 0 headswitch: 0 # milliseconds track-to-track seek: 0 # milliseconds drivedata: 0 8 partitions: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] c: 60036417 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 3737*) ============================== Even if I power down the machine and change the jumpers on the mirrored drives so that master and slave are swapped, I get the same values for ar1 and ar2. (Also kind of strange is that, while these drives are the same model, whatever one is the slave has 3737 cylinders, while the master always has 3736 cylinders.) If I try to edit the label of ar2 with "disklabel -e" (even if it did show the same label as ar1), I get the following error: "disklabel: Operation not supported by device" Any ideas about what's wrong or (more likely) what I'm doing wrong? Since I can mount the e partition on ar2, I'm guessing that the label info is there, but disklabel cannot see it for some reason. I guess I could just edit the label on ar1, then swap master and slave again, and edit the label on the new ar1 so that both should have fstypes of vinum. I'm not sure if vinum would work after this though. I'm assuming that I should be able to see the labels on both ar1 and ar2, so I want to try to fix this problem first. Thanks, pete To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message