Re: FreeBSD slices and the Boot Manager
Hi Ian, Thank you for all of your advices regarding my questions. I have been using FreeBSD for more than ten years, but I never heard of sade (sysadmins disk editor). That is one of the joyful things with running FreeBSD/Unix; there is always something earlier unheard of to explore. And, there is always more than one way to approach a problem. Thank you Ian, Conny On Mon, 29 Jul 2013, Ian Smith wrote: In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 477, Issue 8, Message: 10 On Sat, 27 Jul 2013 19:39:30 +0200 (CEST) Conny Andersson atar...@telia.com wrote: Hi, I have a workstation with two factory installed hard disks. The first disk, ada0, is occupied by a Windows 7 Pro OS (mainly kept for the three year warranty of the workstation as Dell techs mostly speak the Microsoft language). Yes, best humour adherents of the Almighty Bill - keeps them sweet. Instead I have configured the BIOS to boot from the MBR on the second disk as I most of the time (99%) use FreeBSD. The MBR on ada1 was installed with sysinstall's option Install the FreeBSD Boot Manager, when I installed the FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE. Right. sysinstall(8) - or at least the fdisk and bsdlabel modules that constitute sade(8) - remains the only safe and sane way to handle MBR disks. bsdinstall seems fine for GPT, but its paradigm doesn't play so well with trying to do the sorts of manipulations you're talking about here. Why noone's tried to update sade(8) for GPT I don't understand; it's a far better, more forgiving interface, in my old-fashioned? view. (The latest BIOS version 2.4.0 for Dell T1500 does not support UEFI/GPT/GUID.) The second disk ada1, now has three FreeBSD slices: 1) ada1s1 with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE 2) ada1s2 with FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE 3) ada1s3 with FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE I want to install the new FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE on ada1s1 by overwriting the now existing two first slices. This means that ada1s3, must become ada1s2 instead. Is this possible to do? Yes and no. Using sysinstall|sade on my 9.1 laptop -- without setting sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 so it can't write any inadvertent changes to my disk :) -- in the fdisk screen you can delete the first two slices freeing their space for a new slice (or two) and you can then allocate s1 ok, but the existing s3 is still called s3. Would that be a problem? If you only created one slice there you'd have s1 and s3, with s2 and s4 marked as empty in the MBR shown by fdisk(8). MBR slice order need not follow disk allocations, eg s4 might point to an earlier disk region. sysinstall|sade has undo options for both fdisk and bsdlabel modules; it's easy to play with, no chance of damage - even with foot-shooting flag set, unless/until you commit to changes. If in doubt hit escape until it backs right out, nothing will be written. A very important question is if sysinstall's option Install the FreeBSD Boot Manager detects that I have a FreeBSD 8.3 and detect it as slice 2 on disk 1? So it becomes a boot option when I am rebooting? (Maybe the slice may come up as ad6s2, because AHCI in FreeBSD 8.4 isn't enabled at the time of the install.) If you're running 8.4 sysinstall as init, ie booted into the installer, and you've told it to install to s1, then it should set s1 as the active partition in the disk table and in boot0cfg's active slice table. I've never tried it with a second disk so I can't confirm that will all play nice, but you seem to have installed 3 versions ok before :) If not, you can run boot0cfg(8) anytime to set the active slice etc, so that shouldn't be a worry. Likely need to set debugflags=16 to do that on a running system also .. don't forget to set them back to 0 later! (For anyone) still nervous about sade for setting up MBR disks, play with a spare memstick, setup a couple of slices, boot0cfg etc, allocate and delete slices and partitions. Jordan got that together 15years ago so noone would ever need to do those icky slice/partition maths again. My theory: few have been brave enough to dare mess with $deity's work, though it just needs some updates for modern realities, not abandonment. [ Polytropon, it's not 'obsolete' at all; still in 9 anyway. It'll be obsolete when there are no more MBR-only systems in use - say 7 years - OR when bsdinstall incorporates all the missing good sade(8) features, which requires it making a clear distinction between GPT and MBR and working accordingly, including cleaning up GPT stuff if MBR chosen. At 9.1-R anyway, it doesn't do it so well for MBR. Try installing over an existing desired slice partitioning, newfs'ing everything EXCEPT your valuable /home partition. Not for beginners, yet simple in sade(8) ] If the answer to these questions is yes, then the next two questions arise. Can I mount ada1s2a (FreeBSD 8.3) from the newly installed FreeBSD 8.4 and edit my FreeBSD's 8.3-R /etc/fstab according to the new disk layout, and occasionally run FreeBSD 8.3 without problems? Or do I have
Re: FreeBSD slices and the Boot Manager
Hi Peter, I need much more disk space for the FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE, so I will need the space of the two 'old' slices. Thanks, Conny On Sun, 28 Jul 2013, Peter Andreev wrote: Why wouldn't you simply update your 8.1 to 8.4? 2013/7/27 Conny Andersson atar...@telia.com Hi, I have a workstation with two factory installed hard disks. The first disk, ada0, is occupied by a Windows 7 Pro OS (mainly kept for the three year warranty of the workstation as Dell techs mostly speak the Microsoft language). Instead I have configured the BIOS to boot from the MBR on the second disk as I most of the time (99%) use FreeBSD. The MBR on ada1 was installed with sysinstall's option Install the FreeBSD Boot Manager, when I installed the FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE. (The latest BIOS version 2.4.0 for Dell T1500 does not support UEFI/GPT/GUID.) The second disk ada1, now has three FreeBSD slices: 1) ada1s1 with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE 2) ada1s2 with FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE 3) ada1s3 with FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE I want to install the new FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE on ada1s1 by overwriting the now existing two first slices. This means that ada1s3, must become ada1s2 instead. Is this possible to do? A very important question is if sysinstall's option Install the FreeBSD Boot Manager detects that I have a FreeBSD 8.3 and detect it as slice 2 on disk 1? So it becomes a boot option when I am rebooting? (Maybe the slice may come up as ad6s2, because AHCI in FreeBSD 8.4 isn't enabled at the time of the install.) If the answer to these questions is yes, then the next two questions arise. Can I mount ada1s2a (FreeBSD 8.3) from the newly installed FreeBSD 8.4 and edit my FreeBSD's 8.3-R /etc/fstab according to the new disk layout, and occasionally run FreeBSD 8.3 without problems? Or do I have to do more to get it to work? The idea behind this kind of 'reverse' disk layout of mine is to have FreeBSD 8.4 as my new default OS. And have FreeBSD 8.3 untouched for configuring FreeBSD 8.4 and booting into it when ever needed. If I can do this as described above, I will have plenty of space on the disk for the future and a new FreeBSD release. Thanks for your interest in my questions, Conny Andersson =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Conny Andersson atar...@telia.com =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: FreeBSD slices and the Boot Manager
Hi Warren and Polytropon, A few minutes ago I booted up from a FreeBSD-8.4-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img to experience that it is sysinstall that is used in that release. Next, I did a 'dummy' custom installation. And, as I supposed sysinstall recognized disk ada0 as ad4 and disk ada1 as ad6. Then I aborted sysinstall and rebooted in to my FreeBSD 8.3-Release. Well, AHCI (Serial ATA Advanced Host Controller Interface driver) seems involved when identifying disks and slices. But, only on newer computers who has this option set to on in the BIOS. Maybe, bsdinstall in FreeBSD 9.0 and onwards can make use of AHCI directly. When I bought this workstation and installed FreeBSD I thought something was very much wrong with the wiring of the hardware/disks and I phoned Dell's support ... without being much wiser. My old Dell workstation on which I have used all the FreeBSD's from release 4.8 up to 8.0 I always got ad0 and ad1 as the disks in use. So, I had to search the Internet for an answer why my new computer numbered disks oddly. And I found your web page Warren (http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/ahci.html) and I also read the ahci man page. I also had to edit my /etc/fstab accordingly. My FreeBSD 8.3 /etc/fstab: # DeviceMountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass# /dev/ada1s3bnoneswapsw 0 0 /dev/ada1s3a/ ufs rw 1 1 /dev/ada1s3d/home ufs rw 2 2 /dev/acd0 /cdrom cd9660 ro,noauto0 0 proc/proc procfs rw 0 0 linproc /compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0 Apropos labels, I only have two filesystems (+swap) on each slice, as I only run a desktop workstation. I do that following Greg Lehey's advise in his book The Complete FreeBSD 4th Edition. More apropos labels: The latest BIOS version 2.4.0 for Dell T1500 does not support UEFI/GPT/GUID. As far as I know, Dell only have the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface on its PowerEdge servers. (The reason why I want to merge two slices into one big ada1s1 is the need for more disk space for FreeBSD 8.4 and keep 8.3 as it is, but then as slice 2). Thank you, Conny On Sun, 28 Jul 2013, Warren Block wrote: On Sun, 28 Jul 2013, Polytropon wrote: On Sat, 27 Jul 2013 19:39:30 +0200 (CEST), Conny Andersson wrote: A very important question is if sysinstall's option Install the FreeBSD Boot Manager detects that I have a FreeBSD 8.3 and detect it as slice 2 on disk 1? I'm not sure I'm following you correctly. The sysinstall program is considered obsolete, the new system installer is bsdinstall. AFAIK, sysinstall is still used in FreeBSD 8.X, and bsdinstall does not have a boot manager option anyway. So it becomes a boot option when I am rebooting? (Maybe the slice may come up as ad6s2, because AHCI in FreeBSD 8.4 isn't enabled at the time of the install.) Sorry, I don't understand this at all. AHCI should not be involved with identifying slices. That is a _good_ consideration! To make sure things work independently from boot-time recognition, use labels for the file system and then mount them by using the labels. Encode the OS version number in the labels, so it's even easier to deal with them. Use newfs -L on un-mounted partitions (you can do that from the install media). For existing filesystems, that would be tunefs -L. And agreed, filesystem labels make relocation much easier. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: FreeBSD slices and the Boot Manager
Hi Devin, Apropos sade (sysadmins disk editor). I have it at /usr/sbin/sade and I am running a FreeBSD 8.3. I also mounted FreeBSD 8.1 and FreeBSD 8.2 and found sade at /usr/sbin/ even in these older FreeBSDs. Regards, Conny On Sun, 28 Jul 2013, Teske, Devin wrote: In this case, sade is (or was) a direct by-product of the death of sysinstall(8). It only exists in 9 or higher. In-fact... sade was (up until recently in HEAD) actual code removed from sysinstall(8). NOTE: In HEAD, sade(8) is now a direct path to bsdinstall partedit I don't know what the long-term goals are for sade, but it's a nice 4-letter acronym that's a nice keystroke saver (at the very least). -- Devin On Mon, 29 Jul 2013, Ian Smith wrote: --- --- --- Right. sysinstall(8) - or at least the fdisk and bsdlabel modules that constitute sade(8) - remains the only safe and sane way to handle MBR disks. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
FreeBSD slices and the Boot Manager
Hi, I have a workstation with two factory installed hard disks. The first disk, ada0, is occupied by a Windows 7 Pro OS (mainly kept for the three year warranty of the workstation as Dell techs mostly speak the Microsoft language). Instead I have configured the BIOS to boot from the MBR on the second disk as I most of the time (99%) use FreeBSD. The MBR on ada1 was installed with sysinstall's option Install the FreeBSD Boot Manager, when I installed the FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE. (The latest BIOS version 2.4.0 for Dell T1500 does not support UEFI/GPT/GUID.) The second disk ada1, now has three FreeBSD slices: 1) ada1s1 with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE 2) ada1s2 with FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE 3) ada1s3 with FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE I want to install the new FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE on ada1s1 by overwriting the now existing two first slices. This means that ada1s3, must become ada1s2 instead. Is this possible to do? A very important question is if sysinstall's option Install the FreeBSD Boot Manager detects that I have a FreeBSD 8.3 and detect it as slice 2 on disk 1? So it becomes a boot option when I am rebooting? (Maybe the slice may come up as ad6s2, because AHCI in FreeBSD 8.4 isn't enabled at the time of the install.) If the answer to these questions is yes, then the next two questions arise. Can I mount ada1s2a (FreeBSD 8.3) from the newly installed FreeBSD 8.4 and edit my FreeBSD's 8.3-R /etc/fstab according to the new disk layout, and occasionally run FreeBSD 8.3 without problems? Or do I have to do more to get it to work? The idea behind this kind of 'reverse' disk layout of mine is to have FreeBSD 8.4 as my new default OS. And have FreeBSD 8.3 untouched for configuring FreeBSD 8.4 and booting into it when ever needed. If I can do this as described above, I will have plenty of space on the disk for the future and a new FreeBSD release. Thanks for your interest in my questions, Conny Andersson =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Conny Andersson atar...@telia.com =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Problem with newvers.sh in FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE (amd64)
Hi, I have used FreeBSD since 2002, first on i386-arch-machines and from October 2010 on an (Intel i5 750) amd64-arch-machine. On this new computer, a Dell Precision T1500, I now have three operating systems on /dev/ada1s1-3: FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE and FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE. Only the last release have the problem described in the following text. For the first time I got a problem after a kernel is recompiled. Below one can see that what now, after a recompilation should be FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE #1 still is #0, and with a faulty date/time stamp. The number after the hash mark is not updated, neither is the date/time in these kernel messages. What is wrong? newvers.sh? = Misc info msgs about this problem === # $FreeBSD: src/sys/conf/newvers.sh,v 1.83.2.15.2.4 2012/04/08 05:09:40 kensmith Exp $ % ll /boot | grep kernel drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 31232 10 Maj 17:22 kernel drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 31232 9 Maj 14:49 kernel.old (I am a Swedish FreeBSD user, hence 'Maj' instead of May) % sysctl -a | grep kern.version kern.version: FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE #0: Mon May 7 20:00:37 CEST 2012 % uname -a FreeBSD alice.nodomain.nowhere 8.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE #0: Mon May 7 20:00:37 CEST 2012 root@alice.nodomain.nowhere:/usr/src/sys/amd64/compile/ALICE amd64 == I compared by diff /usr/src/sys/conf/newvers.sh with the same file in FreeBSD 8.2 and found some differences. I saved newvers.sh in FreeBSD as ORIG_newvers.sh and copied the newvers.sh from FreeBSD 8.2 to FreeBSD 8.3. Edited the two lines REVISION=8.3, RELEASE=8.3-RELEASE and recompiled. It worked, so now I get the correct answers: % sysctl -a | grep kern.version kern.version: FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE #2: Sun May 13 21:16:37 CEST 2012 % uname -a FreeBSD alice.nodomain.nowhere 8.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE #2: Sun May 13 21:16:37 CEST 2012 root@alice.nodomain.nowhere:/usr/src/sys/amd64/compile/ALICE amd64 Best Regards, Conny Andersson ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
