From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Sep 21 13:29: 6 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from scientia.demon.co.uk (scientia.demon.co.uk [212.228.14.13]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5AF8014BFA for ; Tue, 21 Sep 1999 13:27:43 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ben@scientia.demon.co.uk) Received: from lithium.scientia.demon.co.uk ([192.168.0.3] ident=exim) by scientia.demon.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 3.032 #1) id 11TVMM-0004rB-00; Tue, 21 Sep 1999 20:13:50 +0100 Received: (from ben) by lithium.scientia.demon.co.uk (Exim 3.032 #1) id 11TVML-0004s4-00; Tue, 21 Sep 1999 20:13:49 +0100 Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 20:13:49 +0100 From: Ben Smithurst To: chris@tourneyland.com Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Preparing for a reinstallation Message-ID: <19990921201349.B17788@lithium.scientia.demon.co.uk> References: <3.0.6.32.19990921074537.007e28f0@mail.9netave.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.6i In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.19990921074537.007e28f0@mail.9netave.net> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG chris@tourneyland.com wrote: > I have to reinstall BSD on a machine of mine, and I'm getting some vague > warnings from a FreeBSD 'expert' (HAH!) friend of mine. (The reason I have > to reinstall is - well, never mind, but my friend is never telnetting in > again). He's saying that FereBSD won't create the file system unless the > disk is formatted and clean, and that I have to format it from DOS, You were right to put "expert" in quotes here. He's talking crap. If you have the CD, just install as you did before, on top of your existing system. Delete the partitions in your FreeBSD slice, re-create them as needed, and off you go. (You don't need to delete and re-create if you want to keep them the same size, just toggle the newfs flag (I think that's the term it uses) so it says "UFS Y" when you're creating partitions. This will wipe out the partition and start from scratch.) But, *why* do you have to reinstall? And do you *really* have to, or was this more advice from your "expert" FreeBSD friend? > Yikes! Does anyone know what I should do? I couldn't find anything in the > docs about reinstallation. That's because you don't have to reinstall. This isn't windows, where reinstalling the OS is the second solution to any problem (the first being rebooting, of course). -- Ben Smithurst | PGP: 0x99392F7D ben@scientia.demon.co.uk | key available from keyservers and | ben+pgp@scientia.demon.co.uk To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message