-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Chris Pratt wrote: > I have a server with 6 hot-swap SATA slots. It was delivered > with the first slot empty and 5 drives set up as /dev/ad4 through > /dev/ad12. I'd never paid attention to this until I wanted to add > a 6th, now 4 years later. When I popped it in, I realized the > empty bay was not 6 but rather bay 1, and of course it wouldn't > boot. Presumably /dev/ad2 had now come alive for the first time. > I popped out the disk, rebooted and after it was up, I plugged it > back in (hot) and ran sysinstall. It didn't see the disk so I couldn't > fdisk it. No device files existed for it. > > I was thinking a right approach would be to change fstab to > reference ad2 for all the system disk file systems, shutdown, > move that drive to the first bay and plug the new drive into the > 2nd bay. This seemed like more of a permanent solution. > If those /dev/ad* files are created at boot dynamically, > this should work. I've found docs that imply that they are > dynamically discovered and created from FreeBSD 5 forward > (auto-discovery?). Are they or do I need to create them prior to > start up. > > The thing is, there is no easy recovery from failure here since I > have no console monitor to let me see what's going on or to fix > fstab if it fails (counter-intuitively, the only place I can access > the console is from remote locations ;-)), so I just want to know > if I'm thinking straight? The plan is: > > 1. Change /etc/fstab entries for ad4 filesystems to ad2 > 2. Shutdown > 3. Put the system disk in Bay 1 > 4. Power up > > Should it boot?
Hi Chris, I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know that you can wire physical devices to specific devices files in /dev. I use the /boot/device.hints file to do that. Check this page for more information: http://threads.seas.gwu.edu/cgi-bin/man2web?program=scbus§ion=4 Halfway down the page, you'll see directives like: hint.da.0.at="scbus0" hint.da.0.target="0" hint.da.0.unit="0" I believe you can do something similar with your ad devices, and force the new drive to a different /dev/ad? device file that doesn't cause a boot problem. Hope that helps, Greg -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (FreeBSD) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkkAm2EACgkQ0sRouByUApARlQCcDmUTbVBqui+nNSpcCdDTavIk FywAnj+wR4wtB8vLsYL0BiEfdiRLPnq6 =Y3ZT -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
