format slice

[Freek Nossin]

Thank you for your suggestions, I followed them and this is what happened: 

pcwin451# fdisk -s
/dev/ad0: 39704 cyl 16 hd 63 sec
Part        Start        Size Type Flags
   1:          63    20820177 0x07 0x00
   2:    20820240    19201392 0xa5 0x80

Part 1 is the one I want to convert to a freebsd slice. 

Now I used fdisk -f <file> with the input 

p 1 0 0 0

the operation succeeded. I did again: 

pcwin451# fdisk -s
/dev/ad0: 39704 cyl 16 hd 63 sec
Part        Start        Size Type Flags
   2:    20820240    19201392 0xa5 0x80

And this was indeed the output I expected. So I thought lets see what
sysinstall thinks of all this. Selecting fdisk in the menu showed me a disk
layout where the NTFS partition still was on the disk. 

Disk name:      ad0                                    FDISK Partition
Editor
DISK Geometry:  39704 cyls/16 heads/63 sectors = 40021632 sectors (19541MB)

Offset       Size(ST)        End     Name  PType       Desc  Subtype
Flags

         0         63         62        -     12     unused        0

        63   20820177   20820239    ad0s1      4 NTFS/HPFS/QNX        7
  20820240   19201392   40021631    ad0s2      8    freebsd      165


How can this be? I've always assumed that sysinstall uses the fdisk tool?
And which one is "correct"? Is it wise to try creating a new slice with
fdisk? 



-----Original Message-----
From: Alejandro Pulver [mailto:alejandro at varnet.biz] 
Sent: vrijdag 11 maart 2005 20:15
To: Freek Nossin
Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: format slice

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 17:58:10 +0100
"Freek Nossin" <freeknossin at tiscali.nl> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I have a freebsd installation on a disk with two slices. One of them
> has the current freebsd install, the other has a win2k installation. I
> want to convert the win2k slice to a freebsd slice (by deleting the
> old one and add a new one). I followed the handbook but when I try to
> delete the win2k slice, and want to write the changes to the disk,
> sysinstall returns "a disk error". The steps I took were simple:
> 
> - run sysinstall en select fdisk
> - choose delete on the NTFS slice 
> - Write changes
> 
> Then sysinstall complains that it cannot do that (no specific
> information on the cause of the error is displayed). 
> 
> Does anyone know what can be wrong and how can I solve this?
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Hello,

Try using 'fdisk' directly (man 8 fdisk) and see the complete error
messages.

For example, to delete the second slice (check the numbering with
'fdisk -s') save the following in a file and then run 'fdisk -f <file>'
(but first try the test mode with the -t flag to see if it works as
expected):

p 2 0 0 0

Best Regards,
Ale

P.S.: what is the output of 'fdisk -s'?