*BSD News Article 63841


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From: grail@cray-ymp.acm.stuorg.vt.edu (Giao Nguyen)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Adding in harddrives
Date: 19 Mar 1996 01:44:57 GMT
Organization: ACM Student Machine
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I was noticing that the FAQ was lacking in the section on how to add a new
harddrive in FreeBSD. Also, there seemed to be several questions posted to
this newsgroup in regards to the same concern. And while yes, you can sit
down with a calculator and a lot of technical information and figure it all
out, most users are going to be confused by the disklabel(8) program, there 
is a hack of some sort to add new harddrives.

Okay, here goes:

1) Install harddrive in (going through whatever you have to do).
2) Disconnect the old drive(s).
3) Set the new drive up so that the system will boot up with it.
4) Go through the FreeBSD installation procedure.
5) Partition and label the harddrive and note the slice information.
6) Somehow restart the computer.
7) Install the hardware exactly as you want it in normal operation.
8) Reboot FreeBSD.

Yes, there'll be a need to fsck(8) the all the new slices and manually edit
the /etc/fstab table. it works but it's not elegant. Does anyone have any idea
on how to improve this or a better way than messing around with all the 
technical specs on the harddrive that you're installing.


Anyway, my two bits.


--
Giao Nguyen