[j-nsp] Partition/Format new HD

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 12:26:10PM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> Yes, but it was the dd(1) that fixed the real problem. The disk was
> pre-formatted for either FAT or NTFS and that resulted in a partition
> table on the drive that FreeBSD (JunOS) could not work with. The dd(1)
> command blanked the partition table on the drive so the 'request system
> partition hard-drive' command could do the job.
> 
> I believe that the sequence of things (at the FreeBSD level) is:
> Check for /dev/ad1s1
> If it is not found, fdisk to create it.
> bsdlabel to partition the slice

Back in the day I remember having to do a completely manual fdisk and
bsdlabel, complete with manually calculating all the sizes and offsets
for the slices when the drive size changed (*), whenever I had to
install a new drive. Recently I tried installing 9.3 from install-media
onto a completely non-standard sized drive with some pre-existing
Windows partitions even, and was completely surprised to find that all
the install scripts Just Worked (tm). Go Juniper.

(*) Who else remembers having to boot their Juniper RE-2.0's into dos to
flash the bios from 0.9 to 1.2 to work around the old award bios bug 
that blew up when you put in > 32gb drives? Now THAT was a pain in the 
ass. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)