From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jul 13 22:56:44 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 558C81065670 for ; Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:56:44 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from cwhiteh@onetel.com) Received: from woodbine.london.02.net (woodbine.london.02.net [87.194.255.145]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E71A18FC16 for ; Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:56:43 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from cwhiteh@onetel.com) Received: from [192.168.1.76] (93.97.24.219) by woodbine.london.02.net (8.5.016.1) id 4A203296032CD418 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:56:42 +0100 Message-ID: <4A5BBBA9.2030800@onetel.com> Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:56:41 +0100 From: Chris Whitehouse User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.21 (X11/20090321) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: User Questions Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: partition black magic but no data lost phew! 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: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:56:44 -0000 Hi, This is from memory (brain not ram) and I can't recreate the steps for reasons which will be obvious, so may not be entirely accurate. I have a sata hard disk which is divided into 2 slices. Slice 1 (ad4s1) is about half the disk and had the remains of a standard install with swap, / , /var, /tmp, /usr. Slice 2 (ad4s2) is the remainder and has a single partition for data, ad4s2d. It was all created with sysinstall and doesn't have anything special like dangerously dedicated. The operating system on this machine is on a second hard disk which is what I booted from. I moved all the data from ad4s1f onto ad4s2d so that I could delete partitions from slice 1 and make a single large partition. I then unmounted all ad4* partitions. I may even have rebooted. sysinstall - Configure - Label allowed me to delete ad4s1a but when I tried to delete the other ad4s1* partitions sysinstall told me I had to set kern.geom.debugflags=16 before I could make changes on a running system . I set kern.geom.debugflags but changes I made in sysinstall did not take effect, the partitions persisted, both as /dev/ad4s1* and as entries in sysinstall At some stage sysinstall core dumped and somewhere else ad4s2d got deleted. I managed to recreate it and didn't lose any data. Next I booted from a pen drive and successfully deleted the partitions from slice 1, being very careful not to delete the partition on slice 2, however when I exited from sysinstall ad4s2d was gone. Again I managed to recreate it and didn't lose any data. The bit that puzzles me is that ad4s2d disappeared twice and the second time I am sure I didn't do any explicit steps to delete it. Did I hit a bug in sysinstall or did I do something wrong? I didn't lose any data in the end but I could easily have done (I know - back up - I'm going to go and buy a nice big external hard disk very soon ;) FreeBSD muji 7.1-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE #0: Mon Nov 24 20:22:16 EST 2008 root@pcbsdx32-7:/usr/obj/pcbsd-build/cvs/7.0.2-src/sys/PCBSD i386 Everything is sorted now so I am really asking this out of curiousity. Thanks Chris