Date: Mon, 18 Sep 1995 00:08:50 -0700 (PDT) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Adding/deleting partitions should be Linux-like Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.950917235720.388D-100000@localhost>
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In order to make room for 2.1.0-STABLE source on my hard drive, I got rid
of a 400 meg DOS partition and tried to add it as /usr/src to FreeBSD. I
had nothing but trouble, since fdisk and disklabel are RIDICULOUSLY
difficult to use. No matter how much I RTFM, I just could not figure out
how to change partition 1 from MSDOS to FreeBSD, nor would newfs work
properly without a description of the partition size. It seemed that
everything revolved around writing an /etc/disktab which I did NOT want
to do. In comparison, Linux's mkfs command automagically sizes the
partition and creates the filesystem. I know, I know, the Berkeley FFS
wants to know the cylinder/head/sector geometry in order to optimize the
layout, but with the geometry translations of IDE (and SCSI?) drives,
trying to do this properly is probably futile.
Anyway, I ended up booting my FreeBSD boot disk to run sysinstall and
create the filesystem. After a couple of failures, I managed to create
and mkfs a FreeBSD partition with a single /usr/src slice, but then
FreeBSD wouldn't boot! I realized that the FreeBSD boot loader assumes
partition one (my new /usr/src) is the root partition, so it couldn't find
the kernel. Back to square one. I finally ended up using my trusty LINUX
boot/root disks to run LINUX fdisk to delete partition one and recreate it
as partition three. After rebooting, I FINALLY got it to work, but I
couldn't help but think that if I had access to Linux-style fdisk (with
extensions for FreeBSD slices of course) and an easy-to-use newfs which
didn't depend on the obsolete /etc/disktab file, it would've taken me
about 5 minutes to create the new partition, and not over an hour!
I remember a few weeks ago, someone had mentioned they did a quick code
drop of the fdisk/disklabel out of sysinstall into a stand-alone
program. Has anyone made any progress on this, and if so, will it be
committed to 2.1.0/2.2.0?
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Jake Hamby | E-Mail: jehamby@lightside.com
Student, Cal Poly University, Pomona | System Administrator, JPL
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