bsdlabel and moving to a bigger drive

[Glenn Dawson]

At 03:11 AM 7/25/2005, Omar Thameen wrote:
>I'm trying to transfer a 5.4 box from one drive to another bigger one.
>I've added the second drive, partitioned and labeled it using
>sysinstall's "post-install configuration of FreeBSD" menu item,
>created new partitions with better space allocation, then dumped/restored
>the filesystems.
>
>I had sysinstall create all the filesystems on /mnt so I could do
>the dump/restore.  Because there was no / partition (it was "/mnt"
>on the new drive), sysinstall did not create an ad2s1a partition.
>The / partition on the new drive is thus ad2s1d.
>
>After the dump/restore, I edited /etc/fstab in preparation for putting
>the new drive on the primary IDE controller and the original drive on
>the secondary IDE controller.  On reboot, I had to tell the boot
>process to boot from ad0s1d (the new drive is now ad0) via
>0:ad(0,d)/boot/loader
>at the boot prompt.
>
>That works fine, but I'd like to avoid having to type that in every
>time.  I figured I could just use bsdlabel to rename the 'd' partition
>to 'a' so it can be booted from, but here's my first problem:
>bsdlabel -e ad0s1
>doesn't save my changes.  I've tried this after a default boot and
>in single-user mode.  Do I need to boot from floppy/cd to accomplish
>this, or is there something else I'm missing?

The bootstrap code only knows how to find the 'a' partition.  According to 
the boot(8) man page, the only way to avoid manual intervention at boot 
time is to have the 'a' partition as /

-Glenn


>While I'm on the boot kick, here's my next question.  I tried booting
>from the original drive (now on the 2nd IDE controller) via:
>1:ad(0,a)/boot/loader
>at the boot prompt, but it won't boot because it's looking for the
>kernel on ad0s1d.  The only place I can think it would be getting
>that information from is /etc/fstab the IDE drive on the primary
>controller.  I thought that if I booted from the IDE drive on
>the secondary controller, the whole process would proceed by reading
>files off of that drive - but do the boot files always look on
>the primary drive?
>
>Omar
>
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