From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jan 21 21:35:40 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 709931065672 for ; Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:35:40 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from korvus@comcast.net) Received: from QMTA07.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net (qmta07.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net [76.96.30.64]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5C0CF8FC08 for ; Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:35:40 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from korvus@comcast.net) Received: from OMTA14.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net ([76.96.30.60]) by QMTA07.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net with comcast id 6CEE1b00C1HpZEsA7Mbh0u; Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:35:41 +0000 Received: from [192.168.2.164] ([206.210.89.202]) by OMTA14.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net with comcast id 6MbX1b00X4Mx3R28aMbac6; Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:35:39 +0000 Message-ID: <4977950D.7090900@comcast.net> Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:35:09 -0500 From: Steve Polyack User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (X11/20090105) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Subject: Sysinstall partition oddities (6.3/i386 -> 7.x/amd64) X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:35:41 -0000 I've seen some oddities with the partition and bsdlabel editors in the sysinstall program on the 7.0 and 7.1 releases. The partition editor seems to be reading or parsing the partition table incorrectly. I had a 6.3-RELEASE system with the following layout: /dev/amrd3s1a on / (ufs, local) /dev/amrd3s1g on /opt (ufs, local, soft-updates) /dev/amrd3s1f on /usr (ufs, local, soft-updates) /dev/amrd3s1d on /var (ufs, local, soft-updates) /dev/amrd3s1e on /var/log (ufs, local, soft-updates) Upon booting into the 7.x install media and encountering the FDISK Partition Editor, the partition it's seeing is amrd3*a*s1, as opposed to amrd3s1. Trying to continue with the partition table and bsd labels as is only led to the installer bailing out. As soon as it would attempt to newfs the disk partitions, the installer would error and report that it can't find a device entry in /dev for amrd3*a*s1a. Since preserving the data on the disk was not critical, I was able to continue by deleting the original partition/slice and recreating them. This worked fine. However, I'm still curious as to what the cause of this is. I have seen this before on two other systems while installing 7.x, quite possibly while upgrading from 6.3. When this occurred, I was also moving from i386 to amd64; Is there some kind of offset for partition tables which may change based on architecture? Lastly, here's a screenshot of the partition editor: http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~spolyack/fbsd-install.jpg Unfortunately, I do not have any screenshots of the errors during the newfs step. If this comes up again, I'll be sure to take some. Thanks.