"gpart add" falsely claiming "No space left on device"

[Warren Block]

On Sat, 10 Sep 2016, Perry Hutchison wrote:

> Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, 10 Sep 2016, Ian Smith wrote:
>>> On Tue, 6 Sep 2016 22:54:24 -0700, Perry Hutchison wrote:
>>>> (Old-timers will remember why some of us
>>>> don't like to exceed bs=126b with dd :)
>>> I only go back to '98 on FreeBSD; never heard of that ...
>> I don't see any reason to use less than block sizes ...
>> Actually, I don't see any reason to use less than 64K or even 1M buffer
>> size.  Smaller sizes add huge amounts of overhead with no benefit.
>
> This goes back farther than FreeBSD, to SunOS 4.1 or earlier.
>
> The old-timers I mentioned remember DMA hardware that could not handle
> a buffer spanning a 64KB physical boundary.  It's difficult for a
> driver to comply with such a limitation if the blocksize is larger :)
>
> bs=128b is exactly 64KB, and some of those drivers would throw an
> error on that, so 126b became the largest considered advisable
> absent knowledge that the particular hardware in use could handle
> larger.

Ah, "b" for blocks, not bytes.  I guarantee I have never used that on 
FreeBSD, and never experienced a problem.  On disks, I routinely use 
bs=64K, and 1M for flash can help transfer rates.

>>>> BTW it did boot (I only tried single-user mode) and worked
>>>> well enough to resize itself with "gpart recover".
>>>
>>> Um, do you mean you ran gpart recover on the stick you'd
>>> booted off?
>
> Yep.  No other choice.  8.1 gpart does not understand "recover" --
> although 8.1 geom does complain about the missing backup GPT table
> and say something like "recovery recommended".
>
>> This works but is unnecessary.  Unless you want to store more stuff
>> on the install stick ...
>
> Precisely.  Why else would I be trying to create another partition
> on it?

It was not clear what you were trying to do.  "-f x" added to that.
At this point, it's still confusing how you did a recover if the old 
version of gpart being used did not support that.

>>>> which I take to be the protective MBR of the GPT scheme.
>>
>> Of course, fdisk knows nothing but MBR.  Please stop using fdisk.
>
> Is there another program that will display the details of the
> protective MBR?  AFAIK "gpart show" shows only the GPT itself.

The details of the PMBR do not matter much.  It is supposed to be a 
static structure, an MBR with a single partition, type 0xEE, sized to 
fill the entire disk or 2TB, whichever is smaller.