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Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 17:31:04 +0200
From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>
To: Daniel Underwood <djuatdelta@gmail.com>
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Cc: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Reformatting external harddrive
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On Mon, 11 May 2009 21:18:13 -0400, Daniel Underwood <djuatdelta@gmail.com> wrote:
> After unsuccessfully trying to reformat my external harddrive on my
> linux machine, I'm trying to reformat the disk in FreeBSD.  Frankly, I
> just don't know how to do that.

The command

	# newfs /dev/da0

should reformat the disk. You end up with one partition covering
the whole disk. There's no need to put a slice on it (with a
partition in it) when you're not going to boot from that disk.


> The command
> 
> $ /dev/da0

Souldn't it be

	# fdisk da0

because you're presenting a fdisk output?



> gives the following output:
> 
> ******* Working on device /dev/da0 *******
> The data for partition 1 is:
> sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
>     start 63, size 625137282 (305242 Meg), flag 80 (active)
> 	beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
> 	end: cyl 0/ head 254/ sector 63

There's a FreeBSD partition on that disk.

Which files do you have in /dev?

	# ll /dev/da0*

Maybe you just need to newfs /dev/da0s1{a,c,d,e,...?}.



-- 
Polytropon
>From Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...