Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2004 22:39:49 +0100 From: "Duncan Barclay" <dmlb@dmlb.org> To: <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>, <freebsd-firewire@freebsd.org> Subject: Firewire drives, FreeBSD 4.10 and readonly errors Message-ID: <01e201c463a1$c3d92950$43c8a8c0@orac>
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Hello all
I am setting up a machine (RELENG_4_10) with firewire drives (Maxtor
OneTouch) to act as backup media for a customer. I have done this very
succesfully with 4.9-RELEASE.
My prefered partitioning is to create one MSDOS slice of 1G with a copy of a
miniinst ISO, a dump of / and /usr and a README detailling how to
reconstruct a server. The rest of the drive is a single UFS slice with the
important user data. I do this, so that if anything happens all that needs
to happen is to plug the drive into some h/w (via USB or Firewire) and burn
a CD to rebuild the server.
The problem that I am having is in creating the MSDOS partition under 4.10.
I use fdisk to create the partitions:
# fdisk /dev/da0
******* Working on device /dev/da0 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=19929 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)
Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=19929 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)
Media sector size is 512
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 6,(Primary 'big' DOS (> 32MB))
start 63, size 2088387 (1019 Meg), flag 0
beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
end: cyl 129/ head 254/ sector 63
The data for partition 2 is:
sysid 165,(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
start 2088450, size 318070935 (155308 Meg), flag 80 (active)
beg: cyl 130/ head 0/ sector 1;
end: cyl 1023/ head 254/ sector 63
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
<UNUSED>
Then newfs_msdos the first slice, but I get:
# newfs_msdos /dev/da0s1
/dev/da0s1: 2084280 sectors in 260535 FAT32 clusters (4096 bytes/cluster)
bps=512 spc=8 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf8 spt=63 hds=255 hid=63 bsec=2088387
bspf=2036 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=2
newfs_msdos: /dev/da0s1: Read-only file system
As these drives come pre-formatted with a single slice I have tried:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0s1 bs=2048 count=1024
dd: /dev/da0s1: Read-only file system
1+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes transferred in 0.028599 secs (0 bytes/sec)
What am I doing wrong to get the read-only errors?
I have rebooted between writing a blank partition table and trying the
newfs_msdos to no avail. Other than this error (that prevents a
fsck_msdos -p from completing) writes are fine.
BTW, I can recommend the Maxtor OneTouch products-they come in a nice
chassis and are a robust product with Firewire and USB2 interfaces. As a
backup (not archive) media they are ideal, far cheaper than tape. I have
used them a number of times and provide my clients with a least two drives
to use on rotation. This is more for disaster recovery than anything. The
clients are instructed to keep at least one drive off the premesis.
Duncan
PS. Please CC me on replies from freebsd-firewire as I am not subscribed
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