Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:03:14 -0700 From: Randi Harper <randi@freebsd.org> To: Chris Whitehouse <cwhiteh@onetel.com> Cc: User Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: partition black magic but no data lost phew! Message-ID: <e277d6c80907140203y7ae12267x5fb92aa292024b66@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4A5BBBA9.2030800@onetel.com> References: <4A5BBBA9.2030800@onetel.com>
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On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 3:56 PM, Chris Whitehouse <cwhiteh@onetel.com>wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to " > freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" When you booted from the pen drive, was sysinstall running as init? ie: is this the memstick.img from the ftp site or a homebrew disc1.iso->usb image, or did you have freebsd installed to the pen drive? If so, what version? -- randi
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