Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 20:01:55 +0200 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: Daniel Underwood <djuatdelta@gmail.com> Cc: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Reformatting external harddrive Message-ID: <20090512200155.0dba4e1f.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <b6c05a470905121041o8ca1126i99cfcf55f160232e@mail.gmail.com> References: <b6c05a470905111818ja0ddd76yd5742e4fbfa54bf2@mail.gmail.com> <4A099D64.9050709@infracaninophile.co.uk> <b6c05a470905121041o8ca1126i99cfcf55f160232e@mail.gmail.com>
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On Tue, 12 May 2009 13:41:37 -0400, Daniel Underwood <djuatdelta@gmail.com> wrote: > I have no idea why there is more than 1 partition on this disk. I think I just saw one partition (slice in FreeBSD) in your output. > The data for partition 1 is: > [blah] > The data for partition 2 is: > <UNUSED> > The data for partition 3 is: > <UNUSED> > The data for partition 4 is: > <UNUSED> > Every time I tried to fdisk (or > perhaps it was mkfs.ext3) on in linux, I got errors about a "bad > superblock" (which I understand somehow relates to the journaling > mechanism of ext3). UFS has superblocks, too. > Therefore it is my hope that by reverting to the lowest level tools in > FreeBSD to reformat the drive (if that's even the appropriate step to > take) I can reclaim the ~300GB drive for external storage/backups. These tools are basic tools, not lowest level. In fact, they operate on a very high level of functionality. :-) If you want to use the disk as an external backup storage, the simplest thing is to # newfs /dev/da0 and then just mount it. If you're not going to slice and partition it, there's no need for fdisk or bsdlabel. The device /dev/da0, formerly /dev/da0c, refers to "the one whole partition on DA device 0", as /dev/da0s1c would refer to "the one whole partition covering the 1st slice of DA device 0"; you can, however, have more than one slice on that disk, and different partitions within each slice, such as /dev/da0s2g. But according to your requirement for a backup storage, using the whole disk altogether would surely be the best choice. You can then enter a line like /dev/da0 /backup ufs rw,noauto 2 2 in your /etc/fstab, and then use # mount /backup do your backups or recoveries, e. g. with cpdup or tar, then use # umount /backup It's quite simple to do so. :-) -- Polytropon >From Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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