Problem running fdisk via sysinstall

Thu Jun 24 02:11:55 UTC 2010

Since I don't have any other ideas yet, I'll give that a try.  I'll
let you know if it works tomorrow if it has finished by then :-)

Mark

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 07:46:38PM -0400, Nicholas Mills wrote:
>    Mark,
>    I'm certainly no expert, but I think I can point you in the right
>    direction. The system appears to be attempting to read from a GPT
>    stored on the disk from when you used it on Linux. I'm not sure of the
>    specifics, but I do know that some GPT info is stored near the end of
>    the drive. The easy (but slow) solution would be to use dd to write
>    zeros to the entire drive (da1).
>    Hope this helps,
>    Nick
>    On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 7:28 PM, Mark Costlow <[1]cheeks at swcp.com>
>    wrote:
> 
>      I hope this question isn't too stupid.
>      I have a machine with a 3Ware RAID card, with 4 SATA drives
>      attached.
>      2 drives are 250GB in a RAID1 volume, and act as the boot disk with
>      a standard freebsd partiction map (/, /var, /usr, and swap on this
>      disk).
>      The other 2 drives are 1TB in a RAID1 volume, intended to be mounted
>      as a separate data partition.  At boot both volumes are recognized:
>      Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da0 at twa0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
>      Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da0: <AMCC 9550SX-4LP DISK 3.08> Fixed
>      Direct Access SCSI-5 device
>      Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da0: 100.000MB/s transfers
>      Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da0: 238408MB (488259584 512 byte
>      sectors: 255H 63S/T 30392C)
>      Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da1 at twa0 bus 0 target 1 lun 0
>      Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da1: <AMCC 9550SX-4LP DISK 3.08> Fixed
>      Direct Access SCSI-5 device
>      Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da1: 100.000MB/s transfers
>      Jun 22 18:38:51 ebi7 kernel: da1: 953664MB (1953103872 512 byte
>      sectors: 255H 63S/T 121575C)
>      da0 is fine, and the system boots off of it with no problem.
>      When I try to add da1 to the system, I get the following:
>      * Run systinstall, Configure, Fdisk, select da1
>      * Get the friendly warning about the large geometry, click "Yes"
>      * Hit "A" to use entire disk.  Hit "W" to save, click "Yes",
>      select "None" for boot record.
>      * Fdisk says: "Wrote FDISK partition information out successfully."
>      * Per handbook, get out of sysinstall and re-run it, then
>      try to Label.  In the label editor, it knows nothing about
>      da1 (the device can be selected when going into the label
>      editor, but I can't create any partitions).
>      At the time when Fdisk says "Wrote FDISK partition information out,
>      successfully." this gets logged to /var/log/messages:
>      Jun 23 17:11:18 ebi7 kernel: GEOM: da1: corrupt or invalid GPT
>      detected.
>      Jun 23 17:11:18 ebi7 kernel: GEOM: da1: GPT rejected -- may not be
>      recoverable.
>      I've tried several variations, including running the command-line
>      equivalents, but keep hitting this same error (fdisk thinks
>      everything
>      is good, but the GPT error is logged).  I've also noticed that
>      /dev/da1 exists, but there is no /dev/da1s1 or /dev/da1s1e ... I'm
>      not sure when those should get created.
>      And the final possibly-relevant tidbit: these drives used to be
>      part of a different RAID on a linux system.  They've been
>      re-initialized
>      into the RAID card on this system, and I've zero'd the first 1k of
>      the volume with dd, so I don't *think* that should be a factor.
>      I've worked with about a dozen systems with the same hardware in
>      the configuration outlined above and haven't seen this problem
>      before.  But I'm usually using fresh new disks so maybe it matters.
>      I've googled this issue and found several people reporting similar
>      symptoms over the years, but haven't found any posted solutions
>      aside from telling people to read geom(8).
>      Any hints or clue-by-fours?
>      Mark
>      --
>      Mark Costlow    | Southwest Cyberport | Fax:   +1-505-232-7975
>      [2]cheeks at swcp.com | Web:   [3]www.swcp.com | Voice: +1-505-232-7992
>      [4]abq-strange.com -- Interesting photos taken in Albuquerque, NM
>                        Last post: Shoe Pole - 2009-07-07 20:18:22
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> 
> References
> 
>    1. mailto:cheeks at swcp.com
>    2. mailto:cheeks at swcp.com
>    3. http://www.swcp.com/
>    4. http://abq-strange.com/
>    5. mailto:freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>    6. http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
>    7. mailto:freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org

-- 
Mark Costlow    | Southwest Cyberport | Fax:   +1-505-232-7975
cheeks at swcp.com | Web:   www.swcp.com | Voice: +1-505-232-7992

abq-strange.com -- Interesting photos taken in Albuquerque, NM
                   Last post: Shoe Pole - 2009-07-07 20:18:22