gpart, bsdlabel and fdisk

[Sean C. Farley]

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Aristedes Maniatis wrote:

> We are setting up a FreeBSD system from scratch and wanting to 
> understand the new gpart utility. Our goal is to create a ZFS bootable 
> install (mirror). In the past our approach has been to:
>
> 1. fdisk (allocate entire disk)
> 2. partition (1Gb UFS boot partition, swap and rest empty for ZFS)
> 3. set up ZFS [1]

*snip*

I will let others answer your specific questions.  However, I have a 
file[1] that I have been writing to test installing a system with 
gmirror using only gpart.  It may need tweaking and is a little overkill 
(making room for a future install of Windows 7, if desired), but I can 
use it to install successfully inside a VM.  The '-b 16' options are 
important for the first partition within a slice to make room for the 
metadata even though swap and UFS know to skip those bytes (thanks for 
note from pjd about that).

The plan is to add this to my Wiki page at some point when I am ready. 
If Windows is not involved, you could also try a GPT version of the 
install instead of the MBR in the file, but this file should provide a 
clue of what gpart can do.  I plan on making something equivalent for 
gvinum next.

Comments and corrections welcome.

Sean
   1. http://people.freebsd.org/~scf/Install-gmirror.txt
-- 
scf at FreeBSD.org