From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue May 12 18:02:03 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5E90D106564A for ; Tue, 12 May 2009 18:02:03 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd@edvax.de) Received: from mx01.qsc.de (mx01.qsc.de [213.148.129.14]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1B3948FC14 for ; Tue, 12 May 2009 18:02:03 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd@edvax.de) Received: from r55.edvax.de (port-92-196-7-253.dynamic.qsc.de [92.196.7.253]) by mx01.qsc.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5D1D53D2F8; Tue, 12 May 2009 20:02:01 +0200 (CEST) Received: from r55.edvax.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by r55.edvax.de (8.14.2/8.14.2) with SMTP id n4CI1tSY023350; Tue, 12 May 2009 20:01:55 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from freebsd@edvax.de) Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 20:01:55 +0200 From: Polytropon To: Daniel Underwood Message-Id: <20090512200155.0dba4e1f.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: References: <4A099D64.9050709@infracaninophile.co.uk> Organization: EDVAX X-Mailer: Sylpheed 2.4.7 (GTK+ 2.12.1; i386-portbld-freebsd7.0) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" Subject: Re: Reformatting external harddrive X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list Reply-To: Polytropon List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 18:02:03 -0000 On Tue, 12 May 2009 13:41:37 -0400, Daniel Underwood 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: > > The data for partition 3 is: > > The data for partition 4 is: > > 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, ...