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Date:      Mon, 30 Sep 1996 12:44:20 -0700
From:      Darryl Okahata <darrylo@hpnmhjw.sr.hp.com>
To:        Mark Cheeseman <cheese@bbq.websource.com.au>
Cc:        questions@freefall.freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Adding a second disk - what am I missing? 
Message-ID:  <199609301944.AA271242660@hpnmhjw.sr.hp.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 30 Sep 1996 11:36:34 -0000."

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> I thought sysinstall was supposed to take care of that so I haven't tried it
> until now. Everything looks sensible except for the last few lines which 
> say something like (excuse any typos - I don't have cut/paste here):
> 
> 8 partitions:
> #	size       offset       fstype  [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
>   c:	2031650		0	unused	0     0     # (Cyl.   0 - 27088*)
> 
> Can I just change "unused" to "freebsd"? What should I do about the 8
> partitions? Change it to 1, or leave it as it is?

     If and only if all of the following are true:

* You're an intermediate- to expert-level user.  (DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT
  DOING THE FOLLOWING IF YOU'RE A NOVICE USER!)

* You have a SCSI disk (you did mention "sd0" -- IDE drives may work in
  the following, but I don't know).

* You want to dedicate the *ENTIRE* disk to FreeBSD.

* You have no data on the disk that you want to keep.

* You don't mind losing ALL DATA that is currently on the disk.

* You don't mind destroying any and all MSDOS or Windows 3.1/95/NT
  information that is on the disk.

* You don't plan on using or sharing the disk with other operating
  systems (e.g., MSDOS or Windows).

* You want to partition the *ENTIRE* FreeBSD slice into a single FreeBSD
  filesystem.

Then, the easiest way to add a dedicated disk is the following:

* First, determine the base disk name of the disk you want to add.  Your
  earlier posting said "sd0", a SCSI disk -- is this correct?  This
  implies that you're probably booting off an IDE disk, and not a SCSI
  disk, as "sd0" is typically the boot drive (when booting from a SCSI
  disk).

* Assuming that "sd0" really is correct (MAKE SURE OF THIS, AS YOU'LL
  LOSE ALL DATA ON YOUR BOOT DISK, IF YOU'RE WRONG), do the following
  (assuming Bourne shell /bin/sh syntax):

	# This won't work if you're using /bin/csh:
	d=sd0
	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/r$d count=2
	disklabel /dev/r$d | disklabel -B -R -r $d /dev/stdin
	# We only want one partition, so using slice 'c' should be fine:
	newfs /dev/r${d}c

  (Thanks to Bruce Evans for the procedure.)

You can then mount the drive via a command like:

	mount /dev/${d}c /mnt

Expert users can partition the FreeBSD slice into multiple filesystems
using a slightly different procedure:

	# This won't work if you're using /bin/csh:
	d=sd0
	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/r$d count=2
	TMP=/tmp/label$$
	disklabel /dev/r$d > $TMP
	# Edit disklabel to add partitions:
	vi $TMP
	disklabel -B -R -r $d $TMP
	# newfs partitions appropriately

[ In case anyone's interested, I'm working on a perl script from h*ll
  that attempts to simplify adding an hard disk (this perl script
  generates a shell script that does the proper fdisk/disklabel/newfs
  crud).  I hope to release an alpha version this week to solicit
  comments. ]

     -- Darryl Okahata
	Internet: darrylo@sr.hp.com

DISCLAIMER: this message is the author's personal opinion and does not
constitute the support, opinion, or policy of Hewlett-Packard, or of the
little green men that have been following him all day.



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