Adding a new disk

Okay, I finally got the new drive in there. It was complicated a little because I couldn't find the big foldout instructions for the drive (a Western Digital WD4000). Not that I haven't installed dozens of hard drives, but I was a little confused about the jumper on the CS jumpers. But I just moved it to the Slave jumpers, and later found the folder in my mess on the desk. CS means Cable Select, where I guess the Master/Slave stuff can be done automagically. I never use it.

Then I tried following the directions in the FAQ as mentioned earlier, but it is so out of date as to be almost useless. Here's how I ended up doing it, after a few false starts:

• Use the /stand/sysinstall command


• Selct the Custom option and select 3 Partion command. I selected the 2nd hard drive (ad0 and ad1 were the two listed). When I did this, it complained about a "bad" disk geometry. It said the numbers "77504/16/63" looked bad and it would use more normal numbers. After checking things out a little (like finally noticing the size was listed on the first line of the Parition screen, and a size of 39Gb sounded about right), I decided to let it use its numbers. I don't know where it got the "bad" ones.


• Select the All option, to use the entire hard drive as a FreeBSD partition. Then Q to quit. Don't do the Write option - that will come after the Disk Labeler.


• Then, as I mentioned, select 4 Label, to create the slices in the FreeBSD partition. I first wanted to created a 512Mb swap partition, so I did Create, typed in "512m" for the size, and then selected Swap for the type. Then I Created another partition, using all the rest as a regular FS filesystem, telling it to use /usr/data for a mount point.


• Now I do a Write. It gives you a warning about not doing a Write if you are doing an install, as you'll commit all the changes later. But if you tried to do a write in the "Partition" phase, it would have also warned you to not do the write if you are also adding a new drive, but it doesn't do it here so I guess this is where you do the write.


• Now cancel and exit out of sysinstall, bringing you back to the command line.


• Now I would've thought this would've added some lines to my /etc/fstab file, but it didn't. I even went back into sysinstall, back to the Partition option, and noticed it didn't have a mount point again. So I changed it back to /usr/data, wrote out the changes and went back. However, it still wasn't in the fstab, so I added two lines:
  
  

  
  /dev/ad1s1b		none		swap	sw		0	0
  /dev/ad1s1e		/usr/data	ufs	rw		2	2
  

  
  

  The first line is for my new swap space and the second line is for the 39gb data partition. I couldn't find anything that easily displayed the /dev devices, so I had to go back into sysinstall and see what it displayed.



• Then I rebooted to make sure all was okay and boom - I'm in business.