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FreeBSD Partitions and Filesystems With GPART
FreeBSD Partitions and Filesystems With GPART
The Problem
Installing FreeBSD 8.x on a machine with two disk volumes of 100GB and slightly more than 3TB. The quantity of cylinders on the 3TB volume is greater than the 65,535 cylinders supported by bsdlabel. Therefore, the filesystem does not consume the total available disk space.
This is resolved by installing and implementing gpart. I won’t go into the procedure here as Warren Block blogs on this topic very well at http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html
Installing gpart
GPART is easily installed from FreeBSD.org package repos using pkg_add(1) as follows:
# pkg_add -r gpte
It may also be installed from ports by executing the following:
# cd /usr/ports/sysutils/gpte # make install clean
Disclaimer
This blog is posted for informational purposes only. Extensive testing is recommended prior to implementing changes discussed here.
FreeBSD 8.x and 4K sector disks
FreeBSD 8.x and 4K sector drives
FreeBSD 8.x (and older) use sysinstall as the install mechanism and fdisk for disk slicing/partitioning. Unfortunately, these utilities perform calculations based on a 512B sector size. This causes problems with drives of a sector size greater than this. 4K sector size drives are the most popular at this point.
I cannot explain the problem and solutions any better than Ivan Voras (FreeBSD source contributor since 2008), so I link to his blog here.
There are good tidbits of information in the comments such as sysinstall not understanding gpart, etc. It would be a good idea to read through the comments as well.
hostileadmin 