Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2012 03:55:23 -0400 From: "Thomas Mueller" <mueller23@insightbb.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Cc: Lynn Steven Killingsworth <blue.seahorse.syndicate@gmail.com> Subject: Re: Partitioning with gpart Message-ID: <14.9E.04178.BEACD305@smtp01.insight.synacor.com>
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from "Lynn Steven Killingsworth" <blue.seahorse.syndicate@gmail.com>: > I have installed PC-BSD 9.1 RC1 last week. Very nice I must say. > The default file system is zfs. I have one storage disk which is ufs and > another which is on an mbr partition. I thought I would format the mbr > disk with zfs and move everything from the ufs disk and then format the > ufs disk with zfs. > I have not tried the command line before so I just tried to create over > the disk with: gpart create -s gpt ada2 > The message is that ada2 already exists as a file system. > Show indicates that it is not gpt but mbr. > Then in order to start over I tried to delete and destroy by starting with: > gpart delete -i 1 ada2s1 > The message is that ada2s1 is an invalid argument. > I cannot experiment on my backup as it has only one disk. > Comment please? Either gpt (included in FreeBSD prior to the switch to gpart) or gdisk (now at v0.8.5 and in FreeBSD ports) can migrate an MBR-partitioned disk to GPT without loss of data in many cases, though backing up is still advised. You can find information about gdisk at http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/ gdisk is much more versatile than gpart, can be used to make partitions for Windows, Linux, NetBSD, etc. I don't think you can get gpt for FreeBSD, but if you're curious, you can go to http://www.netbsd.org/ and look for the documentation/man pages. It was gpt in NetBSD that I used to migrate an NTFS partition (MBR) spanning an entire 3 TB Western Digital My Book USB 3.0 hard drive to GPT, no data was lost. I subsequently booted Linux from the System Rescue CD (http://sysresccd.org/) and copied the software/data to a USB stick so I could free the USB 3.0 hard drive for better things. Maybe I could have done the repartitioning with gdisk, which is included on the System Rescue CD, this would be Linux. Tom
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