# panics because of small disk



## rusma (Sep 30, 2009)

Hi all, 

I have a really old 8G IDE drive (pre 2000 i think). I have been able to install and maintain a full OpenBSD 4.5 on it (with sources from cvs and all). It's partitioned like this: 

a 150M /
b 1.5G swap 
d 120M /tmp
e 80M /var
g 6G /usr
h 80M /home

I've tried something similar with freebsd, but when I install new generic kernel from stable branch, the computer is not able to boot (panics in loader, then reboots). 

It's been a while since i tried this last time. Then I asked in another forum where someone suggested I could try to use 512M big /boot and put the rest in zfs. I know very little about zfs.


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## SirDice (Sep 30, 2009)

FWIW my root (/) only has 82MB in use. 150MB should be enough. You may want to tone down the swap space. I'm guessing you have about 512MB in the machine. Depending on what you're going to run I'd say 512MB swap would be enough. If the machine starts to use swap a lot you should add more memory, not more swap. 

I have no idea why the machine would panic but I'm quite sure ZFS won't be the solution to it. You should also note that currently you cannot select ZFS during installation.


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## phoenix (Sep 30, 2009)

On a drive that small, I'd just create 1 slice, and 2 partitions:  swap and /.


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## SirDice (Sep 30, 2009)

Hehe.. I just checked my firewall.. It has a 6GB HD in there :e

There's also a 9GB but that's just mounted on /usr/home to give me some space there.


```
ad0: 6150MB <Seagate ST36421A 6.01> at ata0-master UDMA33
ad1: 9543MB <Maxtor 91000D8 SASX1B18> at ata0-slave UDMA33
```


```
dice@maelcum:~>df -h
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a    359M     82M    248M    25%    /
devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/ad0s1e    290M     32K    267M     0%    /tmp
/dev/ad0s1f    4.5G    201M    3.9G     5%    /usr
/dev/ad1s1d    9.0G     80K    8.3G     0%    /usr/home
/dev/ad0s1d    514M     37M    436M     8%    /var
devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /var/named/dev
```

Never had any issues with it.. Apart from the noise those drives generate :OO


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## Beastie (Oct 1, 2009)

SirDice said:
			
		

> Hehe.. I just checked my firewall.. It has a 6GB HD in there :e
> 
> There's also a 9GB but that's just mounted on /usr/home to give me some space there.


One of my desktops has a 6.something GB HDD *only* and it's dual-booting with W2K. I beat you out. 




			
				SirDice said:
			
		

> Never had any issues with it.. Apart from the noise those drives generate :OO


The charm of older machines! Here, there's also the "farm tractor" fan sound effect. :e


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## rusma (Oct 1, 2009)

Thanks for all the answers, 

have you folks been able to update all sources using csup, and build a generic kernel? 

'SirDice' #1: Do you think it would be possible in zfs in installation in future releases?


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## SirDice (Oct 1, 2009)

rusma said:
			
		

> Thanks for all the answers,
> 
> have you folks been able to update all sources using csup, and build a generic kernel?


I don't build anything on that machine. I do all my building on a server. The 'small' machine simply mounts /usr/src/, /usr/obj and /usr/ports from the server.  



> 'SirDice' #1: Do you think it would be possible in zfs in installation in future releases?


Possible but I wouldn't want to hold my breath in the meantime


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## phoenix (Oct 1, 2009)

On a system that small, you wouldn't want to run ZFS.


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## rusma (Oct 1, 2009)

hmm.. I partitioned my slice like this in a fresh installation just now: 

b 512m swap 
a rest (about 7.3G) /

(just installed "base"- and "kernels"-packages. 

, then rebooted, but the system would not start (hangs in loader/spinner and then reboots). 

(I think this is what I initially meant to ask about, but did not know how to)

What to do?


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