From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Nov 27 10:45:12 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 563DD106564A for ; Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:45:12 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from des@des.no) Received: from tim.des.no (tim.des.no [194.63.250.121]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 17CAD8FC1A for ; Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:45:12 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from des@des.no) Received: from ds4.des.no (des.no [84.49.246.2]) by smtp.des.no (Postfix) with ESMTP id 202EF6D43F; Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:45:11 +0000 (UTC) Received: by ds4.des.no (Postfix, from userid 1001) id E9EA08449F; Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:45:10 +0100 (CET) From: =?utf-8?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=C3=B8rgrav?= To: "Peter Steele" References: <2ACA3DE8F9758A48B8BE2C7A847F91F240CE6B@polaris.maxiscale.com> <20081126153510.6062cd55@bhuda.mired.org> <2ACA3DE8F9758A48B8BE2C7A847F91F240CE99@polaris.maxiscale.com> <20081126190545.17b79195@bhuda.mired.org> <2ACA3DE8F9758A48B8BE2C7A847F91F240CEB4@polaris.maxiscale.com> Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:45:10 +0100 In-Reply-To: <2ACA3DE8F9758A48B8BE2C7A847F91F240CEB4@polaris.maxiscale.com> (Peter Steele's message of "Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:53:11 -0800") Message-ID: <861vwx4fd5.fsf@ds4.des.no> User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.0.60 (berkeley-unix) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, Mike Meyer Subject: Re: FreeBSD boot menu is missing X-BeenThere: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Technical Discussions relating to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:45:12 -0000 "Peter Steele" writes: > Man, I wish I'd known this. I built a whole automated framework around > this, assuming you couldn't set up the initial mirror drive with a live > file system. I'll have to try your solution; it is definitely the way to > go. We are dealing with identical size drives as well so this shouldn't > be a problem. Just make sure you leave a few unallocated blocks at the end of the disk (for gmirror metadata). In most cases, this happens automatically, because the size of the disk is not a multiple of the (fake) cylinder size. To pick one at random, I have a Maxtor 6B300S0 here with 586112591 LBA sectors where the fake c/h/s geometry only adds up to 586111680 sectors, leaving 911 sectors at the end. > We don't want to mirror the whole drive, just the OS partitions. I > decided to go with the full slice mirroring because of what was > described in this link. If mirroring the partitions in the slice is the > better way to go, then that's fine my me.=20 Mirroring the entire slice is far simpler. If you mirror individual partitions, you have to label them *before* you newfs them. I would mirror the whole drive, though - and I would use ZFS, with which you can easily transition to larger drives (just replace them one by one and resilver in between - you can even do it online if your disks are hot-swappable) DES --=20 Dag-Erling Sm=C3=B8rgrav - des@des.no