# Probs installing 8.1 amd64 on usb-device



## Oscar426 (Oct 30, 2010)

Hi there,

i I got myself an older notebook (Thinkpad T61) and i I want to use it as a DSL-router and fileserver. I installed 2 750Gbyte HDs into the notebook, these are supposed to be used for storage, and the OS is supposed to run from a smaller HD connected via USB.

So i I got the bootonly-CD and started the installation. It turned out that i I had to abort/restart the installer (using ctrl-c) because the USB-Drive wasnt wasn't initialised in time, but after restarting the installation the da0-device was found and could be configured. 

I used the default values for the filesystem, chose the installation package, configured the network and thought it would install ...

But after just a few seconds i I got error messages, something like 
	
	



```
cannot create symlink, no free inodes
```

So i I aborted ... googled, found nothing helpful and was not amused. Ok next try: installation on the internal sata drive, it worked, then connecting the usb-device, booting from freebsd FreeBSD Live CD and copying the filesystems from the internal HD to the USB HD using dump/restore, then install the bootmanager to da0 and tried to boot ...

The bootmanager was there, kernel got loaded, but cannot mount the rootfs. It seems the USBHD isn't ready in time. Theres There's simply no da0 device present at the time the kernel wants to mount the root fs ... ok ... now i I invested much time in this and i I dont don't get it working, its it's getting annonying, even more annoying because ubuntu installs just fine on the same hardware configuration.

Anyone here with some hints for me? many Many thanks in advance. I'd really like to stick with FreeBSD but i I need to get this one working.


----------



## wblock@ (Oct 30, 2010)

Do you have

```
kern.cam.boot_delay=10000
```
in /boot/loader.conf?


----------



## Oscar426 (Oct 30, 2010)

\o/

thanks Thanks, this one solved it 
for For some reason the fstab was lost as well, but now it works fine. 

Many thanks!


----------



## Oscar426 (Oct 30, 2010)

one One thing is sort of strange ... i I fittet fitted 2 HDs, each 750GByte ... after creating a file-system on each of them there are only 623GByte left. 

I know you lose some, but this is much ... 130GByte gone for overhead or so?

I've read that these harddrives are formatted with 4kbyte-sectors (instead of 512 which is said to be the usual value). could Could this be the reason?


----------



## wblock@ (Oct 30, 2010)

Oscar426 said:
			
		

> hmm one thing is sortof strange ... i fittet 2 HDs, each 750GByte ... after creating a file-system on each of them there are only 623GByte left. I know you loose some, but this is much ... 130GByte gone for overhead or so?
> I've read that these harddrives are formatted with 4kbyte-sectors (instead of 512 which is said to be the usual value) could this be the reason?



Probably not, more likely:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#MANUFACTURER-DISK-SIZE


----------



## Oscar426 (Oct 30, 2010)

maybe Maybe someone could take a look at these numbers. Is it normal that you have so much loss of capacity? buying Buying a 750Gbyte disk and you lose almost 130GByte?


```
[root@blubb ~]# fdisk ad0
******* Working on device /dev/ad0 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=1453521 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=1453521 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Media sector size is 512
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 1 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 2 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
    start 0, size 50000 (24 Meg), flag 80 (active)
        beg: cyl 0/ head 0/ sector 1;
        end: cyl 1023/ head 254/ sector 63

[root@blubb ~]# /dev/ad0
ad0   ad0a

[root@blubb ~]# mount
/dev/ad0a on /mnt (ufs, local)

[root@blubb ~]# df -h
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0a      677G    4.0K    623G     0%    /mnt
```


----------



## wblock@ (Oct 30, 2010)

Well, your "750G" drive is really (1453521*16*63*512)/(1024^3) 750,156,374,016 bytes, or 699G from the manufacturer.

fdisk(8) output doesn't look right, 24M.  Try
`% gpart show ad0`

Anyway, your "a" partition is 677G in size, less the 8% shown in the FAQ above gives 623G.


----------



## Oscar426 (Oct 30, 2010)

Ah, ok ... thanks for clearing that up.


----------

