Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 9 Jan 1997 22:51:51 +0100
From:      j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
To:        kingram@ipro.com (Ken Ingram)
Cc:        FreeBSD-current@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Adding Hard Drives - Prepping
Message-ID:  <Mutt.19970109225151.j@uriah.heep.sax.de>
In-Reply-To: <199701091855.KAA22100@ipro.com>; from Ken Ingram on Jan 9, 1997 11:02:36 -0800
References:  <199701091855.KAA22100@ipro.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
As Ken Ingram wrote:

> My question is: Why do i have to spend hours of time cross-referencing
> every damn thing when all I want to do is format the bloody thing.

You don't have to spend hours for cross-referencing.  Not necessarily.
When some of us started back in 1992, all we had were the man pages.
Nothing else, perhaps a little Usenet support by the more experienced.

Well, we figured it out, and i can't remember it took me too many
hours getting the picture.  However, it requires you to leave
traditional PeeCee thinking (like fdisk, or the misnomer MS-DOS calls
`format' which actually can be anything or nothing at all, depending
on the time of day).

> Is there or is there not a simple way to do this?

It depends on what you mean with `format'.  Low-level format?  For a
SCSI disk, use /sbin/scsiformat.  For an IDE drive, ask the vendor of
your drive, he's the only one to know.  Certainly, you don't need or
want to low-level format your drive.  Do you want to fdisk it, in
order to share it with other operating systems?  Well, use fdisk.
It's not great, we know, but nobody has ever been bothered to write a
new one.  Do you want to disklabel it, in order to create partitions?
Certainly, you want.  That's the only mandatory step.  Well, either
read the FAQ, or read the man page.  Or ask a question one could
really answer.  (Not just ``All this sucks, i don't get it.''  What do
you expect us answering to this?)  Do you want to ``high-level
format'' (or simply spoken: create) your filesystems?  Yes, you want.
Use newfs for this.  It often doesn't require any other argument than
the name of the raw device at all.

> If there is a simple way what should be investigated when it isn't working
> as described (e.g. FAQ part 2.15)?

Investigate.  Describe it better.  Fix the bugs -- i have never
experienced them, so it's harder for me to fix it.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Mutt.19970109225151.j>