Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 09:43:09 +0100 From: Brad Knowles <blk@skynet.be> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Vinum questions? Message-ID: <19990317094309.032269@relay.skynet.be> In-Reply-To: <19990317085224.W429@lemis.com>
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On Wed, Mar 17, 1999, Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
>What was the problem?
I don't know for sure. All I am sure that I know is that when I
tried to disklabel the disks, it would let me see what they were, but not
change anything. The suggestion was to go back to /stand/sysinstall and
try going through parts of the installation process that were related to
partitioning the affected disks and then putting a new filesystem on
them, and I believe that the logic was that if I could get it to the
point where I could put a filesystem on some partition other than the "c"
partition, then I should be able to remove whatever I had created
(changing the filesystem type back to "unused") and then re-use those
partitions for vinum.
>I am not going to "fix" it because there is nothing to fix. It is
>WRONG to use partition c for data storage, and I go to some lengths to
>ensure you can't.
I'm sorry. I did not mean to imply that there was anything broken
with not being able to use the "c" partition. I'm perfectly willing to
accept that you are correct in this philosophy. My issue is a more
technical one -- if the system won't let me create any new partitions on
the drive, and the only partition that currently exists is the "c"
partition, then I've got a problem that has to be resolved so that I can
create other partitions. The suggestion that was made to me (and it
seemed to work) was going back to /stand/sysinstall.
>Correct. I'm trying to find out why you can't do that, but you need
>to give me some details.
I'm sorry. I wish I could give you more details than I already have.
Unfortunately, we keep re-hashing the same details and you keep telling
me that I'm not giving you any details. I'm not sure what more I can
tell you.
>Wrong. In order to create a file system, you need a partition of type
>"4.2BSD". In order to create a vinum drive, you need a partition of
>type "unused" or "vinum". This is an elementary protection against
>wiping out data on the wrong disk, and it's described in vinum(8):
I understand this. Once I could successfully create filesystems on
the disks in question, I went back in with disklabel -er on each of the
nine disks in question and I changed each and every one of them back to
"unusued". I did read and understand that part of the FM.
However, if I'm at a point where I can't even partition the disk,
much less put filesystems on it, I'm certainly not going to be able to
use the disk with vinum and I've probably got a deeper problem of some
sort that needs to be solved. The easy solution is to try and fix things
so that I can add new partitions to the disk, and put filesystems on
those partitions. Once I can get to that stage, I can back out the
filesystems I had put on the disk and re-use those partitions with vinum,
right?
--
These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy
____________________________________________________________________
|o| Brad Knowles, <blk@skynet.be> Belgacom Skynet NV/SA |o|
|o| Systems Architect, News/mail/FTP Admin Rue Col. Bourg, 124 |o|
|o| Phone/Fax: +32-2-706.11.11/12.49 B-1140 Brussels |o|
|o| http://www.skynet.be Belgium |o|
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