Firewire drives, FreeBSD 4.10 and readonly errors

[Daniel O'Connor]

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On Wed, 7 Jul 2004 07:09, Duncan Barclay wrote:
> My prefered partitioning is to create one MSDOS slice of 1G with a copy of
> a miniinst ISO, a dump of / and /usr and a README detailling how to
> reconstruct a server. The rest of the drive is a single UFS slice with the
> important user data. I do this, so that if anything happens all that needs
> to happen is to plug the drive into some h/w (via USB or Firewire) and burn
> a CD to rebuild the server.

Neat idea :)

> Then newfs_msdos the first slice, but I get:
> # newfs_msdos /dev/da0s1
> /dev/da0s1: 2084280 sectors in 260535 FAT32 clusters (4096 bytes/cluster)
> bps=512 spc=8 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf8 spt=63 hds=255 hid=63 bsec=2088387
> bspf=2036 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=2
> newfs_msdos: /dev/da0s1: Read-only file system
>
> As these drives come pre-formatted with a single slice I have tried:
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0s1 bs=2048 count=1024
> dd: /dev/da0s1: Read-only file system
> 1+0 records in
> 0+0 records out
> 0 bytes transferred in 0.028599 secs (0 bytes/sec)
>
> What am I doing wrong to get the read-only errors?
>
> I have rebooted between writing a blank partition table and trying the
> newfs_msdos to no avail. Other than this error (that prevents a
> fsck_msdos -p from completing) writes are fine.

Can you try 
fdisk -I da0
disklabel -e da0s1
[ .. ]
newfs /dev/da0s1a
?

Also try editing the partition table and changing it to a DOS partition and 
seeing if newfs_msdos works?

> BTW, I can recommend the Maxtor OneTouch products-they come in a nice
> chassis and are a robust product with Firewire and USB2 interfaces. As a
> backup (not archive) media they are ideal, far cheaper than tape. I have
> used them a number of times and provide my clients with a least two drives
> to use on rotation. This is more for disaster recovery than anything. The
> clients are instructed to keep at least one drive off the premesis.

I've used them (had to get a patch from Mr Firewire before they'd work :)
I prefer Mapower aluminium cases, cheaper and you can customise the drive.
(And they seem to work just as well.. probably got the same interface)

- -- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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