From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Dec 10 09:18:11 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7886316A4CE for ; Wed, 10 Dec 2003 09:18:11 -0800 (PST) Received: from blacklamb.mykitchentable.net (67-51-118-244.dsl1.elk.ca.frontiernet.net [67.51.118.244]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1FC8043D09 for ; Wed, 10 Dec 2003 09:18:10 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from drew@mykitchentable.net) Received: from bigdaddy (bigdaddy.mykitchentable.net [192.168.1.3]) by blacklamb.mykitchentable.net (Postfix) with SMTP id 3B7E23BF35A for ; Wed, 10 Dec 2003 09:18:09 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <035301c3bf41$95585740$0301a8c0@bigdaddy> From: "Drew Tomlinson" To: "FreeBSD Questions" Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 09:18:09 -0800 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2720.3000 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2727.1300 Subject: Trouble Adding New Boot Drive X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 17:18:11 -0000 I have a 4.9 system that has two identical 850 MB drives and a 4 GB drive. The system boots from one of the 850 MB drives (ad0s1a) and uses a 50 MB slice (?) for root. The rest of this drive is unused. The 4 GB drive (ad2s1e) contains /usr. The other standard filesystems such at /var, /tmp, etc. are symlinked to /usr/* as suggested in The Complete FreeBSD for simple systems. Anyway, the system is sometimes inaccessible due to a flurry of hard errors on ad0. The only way into the system is to power off/on and then let fsck sort things out. Then the system will run fine for days and even weeks but it will eventually happen again. I suspect a complete disk failure is eminent. Thus, I would like to use ad1 (the unused 850 MB drive) in place of ad0 but instead of limiting the root partition to 50 MB, I'd like to just use the whole disk. I have followed instructions from man and web pages in an attempt to get this going. I used /stand/sysinstall to fdisk and added the boot flag. Here's the current fdisk output: blacksheep# fdisk -s ad1 /dev/ad1: 6616 cyl 4 hd 63 sec Part Start Size Type Flags 1: 0 1667232 0xa5 0x80 Then I used /stand/sysinstall to disklabel and newfs. Here's the current disklabel output: blacksheep# disklabel ad1 # /dev/ad1c: type: ESDI disk: ad1s1 label: flags: bytes/sector: 512 sectors/track: 63 tracks/cylinder: 4 sectors/cylinder: 252 cylinders: 6616 sectors/unit: 1667232 rpm: 3600 interleave: 1 trackskew: 0 cylinderskew: 0 headswitch: 0 # milliseconds track-to-track seek: 0 # milliseconds drivedata: 0 8 partitions: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] a: 1667232 0 4.2BSD 2048 16384 90 # (Cyl. 0 - 6615) c: 1667232 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 6615) Next, I mounted ad1s1a and used several 'cp -Rp' commands to copy the contents of / to ad1s1a. Now for the test... I read the boot man page and surmised that the way to boot from ad1 was to use '1:ad(1,a)/kernel' at the boot prompt but I get this error: Disk error 0x1 (lba=0x47a14bc0) Invalid format I've never attempted anything like this before so it's very possible I'm missing something basic. Any ideas? Thanks, Drew