*BSD News Article 35705


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From: wjin@rodin.cs.uh.edu (Woody Jin)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Add 2nd hard drive
Date: 2 Sep 1994 15:38:19 GMT
Organization: University of Houston
Lines: 65
Message-ID: <347gtb$r8h@masala.cc.uh.edu>
References: <341m5a$dju@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> <1994Sep2.052039.2127@news.csuohio.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodin.cs.uh.edu

In article <1994Sep2.052039.2127@news.csuohio.edu>,
Steve Ratliff <stever@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>
>	The 3 second answer is to get "Unix System Administration
>Handbook" by Nemeth, Snyder, and Seebass. ISBN 0-13-933441-6
>A great book and about 80% applicable to Free/NetBSD.

I understand that reading all those books / man pages and becoming
a unix guru is the best way to handle all these problems,
but I hope that there would be  some FAQ entries which
explains such things step-by-step for the new users,
so that they can just do it by following those steps one-by-one.

I am not really a new user, I somehow understood when I read those
materials.  But when I need to do it again after a while,
I have to re-read all those stuffs, which takes quite a time.

For some well known procedures (such as adding one more disk, ...etc.)
I hope that there should be FAQ entries which explains clearly and
easily.   I think that this is why programmers write functions,
and libraries, modules, ...etc., rather than  saying, 
"Read the C programming manual or Unix programming manual and you 
 should be able to program what you need."

>
>to see how your existing drive is set-up.  You will need to know from
>the new drive's data sheet how many cylinders, heads, and sectors/track
>it has.  You then get out a calculator and start writing your disktab
>entry making sure that you allocate partitions in whole cylinder
>groupings.  You multiply the number of heads times the number of sectors
>in a track to get the number of sectors/cylinder.  Assign multiples of
>this number to each partition.

I found that there are several bad blocks.  I fixed them with
MS-DOS  scandisk.  Should those bad blocks be counted in the 
above sector numbers ?
How does FreeBSD handle bad blocks ?

The FAQ only says (as far as I remember) that the bad block handling 
is not perfect.
Knowing that I have some bad blocks (and were fixed using MS-DOS tools
- I think that actually there were removed),
should it be OK to use the disk ?
(FreeBSD FAQ says, "Try and see", but you really don't know whether
something goes wrong)
If there are new bad blocks while running FreeBSD, how does
FreeBSD file system handle ?

>
> ... [del] ...
>	Then read the disklabel man page and disklabel your drive.  Then
>read the newfs man page and newfs /dev/rwd1a and /dev/rwd1e.  You then
>run fsck on /dev/rwd1a and /dev/rwd1e.  (CAUTION:  MAKE SURE YOU DO THE
>NEWFS ON *WD1* <--- AND NOT *WD0*)  You then read the man page on fstab
>and add entries for these mount points in /etc/fstab.  Then reboot and
>you should be set.

Thanks, Steve for your kind answers.
I was about to add one more disk and was trying to find time to read
all those stuffs.

>Steve    

--
Woody Jin