Disklabe oddity

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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Output wrapped.

On Saturday, 20 September 2003 at 10:44:28 +0200, Guy Van Sanden wrote:
> I get a strange message from disklabel:
> Warning, partition c doesn't start at 0!
> Warning, partition c doesn't cover the whole unit!
> Warning, An incorrect partition c may cause problems for standard system
> utilities
>
> What does this mean?

Well, as it says, your c partition doesn't start at 0, so it also
can't cover the whole unit:

   #      size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
   c: 78156162       63    unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0*-4864*)

What part of that don't you understand?

> The disk was formatted by the FreeBSD install procedure.

If you haven't changed anything here, it would be interesting to know
in more detail just what you did.  To judge by the surprising number
of partitions, you didn't take the defaults.

> The system is an older Digital PC (3500) PII 333 Mhz.
> The disk is a 40 GB IDE drive (WD)
>
> BTW, I'm looking for a safe way to 'grow' my rootfs, I've looked
> arround before, but I'm still not clear on the right procedure for
> it.

Take a look at growfs(8).  To do it right, you need space directly
behind the root file system.  Even Vinum won't help here.  You could
move the swap space elsewhere, for example.

> I'm considering reinstalling the system with 5.2, reformatting the
> disk,

There's seldom a reason either to reinstall or to reformat.  If you
don't want anything of the current installation, reinstallation may be
faster, however.

> but I don't know if this will clear the error.

You can clear the error by running disklabel -e /dev/ad0s1a in single
user mode, and changing the length and offset of partition c (offset
0, add 63 to the size).

Greg
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