On Tuesday 17 July 2007, Kevin Cheng wrote: > It was done by hardware mirror machine from http://www.logicube.com/. > No issues for Intel to intel platform, but if Intel to VIA then you > are right that it's better to reinstall whole thing. This works for 5 > years since BSD 3.1
Though it may seem to work, it's not supported and it may not be safe. A more reliable (and supported) way to deal with it would be scripting fdisk(8), disklabel(8) and restore(8). The variance in disk by disk geometry (within the same model number) and the variance in system bioses/chipsets (intel/via) would not make any difference to your scripts. The cool part of scripting it is you can now "image" multiple disks in parallel (see the -f switch in restore(8)) directly the the hardware where they will run. When you're buying hard drives in bulk by the case, more often than not they all have the same geometry (i.e. same batch from manufacturing), so you can often get away with some kinds of mirroring and other tricks. Unfortunately, it doesn't always hold true and there can be variations within the same model number on a disk by disk basis. Whether or not such variations in drives can cause problems in your mirroring setup is simply unknown but it's something to watch for. I've seen this cause problems with RAIDs. The admin used the entire disk (all of the original disks were identical), then a drive fails, so they get a replacement (same model number) which is slightly different (smaller) and can't be used. wash, rise, repeat, until the admin either finds a drive of the same or slightly larger capacity with the same model number or they just use a bigger drive than necessary (a different model number). If there actually is a safe and reliable way to do "disk imaging" for OpenBSD, I've never seen it mentioned anywhere. The OpenBSD FAQ says there is no such beast. http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html 4.14 - - How can I install a number of similar systems? "Unfortunately, there are no known disk imaging packages which are FFS-aware" kind regards, JCR
