From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jan 6 22:54:55 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 88F03106566B for ; Thu, 6 Jan 2011 22:54:55 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from xaero@xaerolimit.net) Received: from mail-ew0-f54.google.com (mail-ew0-f54.google.com [209.85.215.54]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 16D7E8FC13 for ; Thu, 6 Jan 2011 22:54:54 +0000 (UTC) Received: by ewy24 with SMTP id 24so7915891ewy.13 for ; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:54:53 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.213.36.2 with SMTP id r2mr10736842ebd.51.1294354493083; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:54:53 -0800 (PST) MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.213.8.142 with HTTP; Thu, 6 Jan 2011 14:54:32 -0800 (PST) In-Reply-To: References: <20101229120038.3DFB0106591A@hub.freebsd.org> <20101230133126.O36121@sola.nimnet.asn.au> <20101231105353.S36121@sola.nimnet.asn.au> <20110102102255.00004f57@unknown> <20110102230702.N49334@sola.nimnet.asn.au> <20110103022619.O49334@sola.nimnet.asn.au> <20110104143245.P49334@sola.nimnet.asn.au> <20110105152725.U49334@sola.nimnet.asn.au> <20110106160720.B49334@sola.nimnet.asn.au> <20110106230849.H49334@sola.nimnet.asn.au> From: Chris Brennan Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2011 17:54:32 -0500 Message-ID: To: Warren Block Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 X-Content-Filtered-By: Mailman/MimeDel 2.1.5 Cc: Bruce Cran , Adam Vande More , Ian Smith , FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2011 22:54:55 -0000 On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Warren Block wrote: > On Fri, 7 Jan 2011, Ian Smith wrote: > > Manual fdisk & bsdlabel & newfs would confirm that or otherwise, but Chris >> will have to hunt up mans, docs and howtos on doing that himself, they're >> out there. >> > > Aha! http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html > > May/may not be helpful, but the price is right. Feedback welcome. > Can I bow at your feet?!? This gave me just enough of a clue to go back and arbitraility pass 'gpart delete -i 1 ad4' which actually deleted a partition! I then zeroed the first 73 and the last 33 blocks of the drive. fdisk still complained about 'Class not found' which I googled and found to be an artifact of gpart(8). So my question is this now, once gpart has touched a disk, does it have the partition-aids now? Moving on, I then continued the standard process listed by your link, bsdlabel'd my layout and saved it, when I do an 'ls -lsga /dev | grep ad4' I see that I have partitions a,b,d,e,f and I was able to newfs each one of them Next question, from this point (at the fixit prompt) can I preform a manual install of just base? if I can get the system installed at this point then all should be good when I reboot.