Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:43:32 -0500 From: Steve Polyack <korvus@comcast.net> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org, Mike Tancsa <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Sysinstall partition oddities (6.3/i386 -> 7.x/amd64) Message-ID: <4978BE54.9060203@comcast.net> In-Reply-To: <4977950D.7090900@comcast.net> References: <4977950D.7090900@comcast.net>
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Steve Polyack wrote: > 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. > This also occurs in VMWare. I'm able to get the exact same behavior by installing a 7.1-RELEASE system (single slice, da0s1), then booting off the install media and start a new installation. It picks up the partition as da0as1 instead of da0s1, making it impossible to use sysinstall while preserving existing partitions. -Steve Polyack
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