The FreeBSD Diary

Providing practical examples since 1998

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I had need of a new drive to make a backup. I was having extreme trouble with one box, and had no network connections at all. I borrowed a disk from someone and tried following the instructions at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks-adding.html. Unfortunately, they failed me.

Using sysinstall, I was told my disks could not be found. Strange. I was booting off one of them.

Using the first set of instructions under 10.5.2.2 Dedicated, I failed when I did the step:

# disklabel -e da1               # create the `e' partition

Ummmm, I had no idea how to do that....

So I did the next best thing. I tried the alternate method:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rda1 count=2
# disklabel /dev/rda1 | disklabel -BrR da1 /dev/stdin
# newfs /dev/rda1e
newfs: /dev/rwd1e: 'e' partition is unavailable
# newfs /dev/rda1e

Hmmm, that's not much better. Then I remembered what I'd seen under "disklabel -e da1", namely a 'c' partition. So I tried this instead:

# newfs /dev/rda1c

That worked!

So then it was on to backing up one drive to another. Which I will write about later this week.