# FreeBSD 9 and GPT



## mrtonyg (Jan 29, 2012)

Hey guys, I installed FreeBSD 9 with GPT (used the manual partitioning) with labels as described here. Everything works fine except when I add a new disk it throws off the naming scheme. Now I realize that GPT is supposed to address this issue.

I tried to use the /dev/gpt naming in fstab but I don't have a /dev/pgt directory. What am I doing wrong? Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Tony


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## wblock@ (Jan 29, 2012)

Please show the output of
`% gpart show -l ada0`


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## mrtonyg (Jan 29, 2012)

```
office# gpart show -l ada2
=>      34  78140093  ada2  GPT  (37G)
        34      1024     1  (null)  (512k)
      1058   4194304     2  rootfs  (2.0G)
   4195362   8388608     3  (null)  (4.0G)
  12583970  12582912     4  varfs  (6.0G)
  25166882   2097152     5  tmpfs  (1.0G)
  27264034  50331648     6  usrfs  (24G)
  77595682    544445        - free -  (265M)
```


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## wblock@ (Jan 29, 2012)

The labels look okay.  How about the output of
`% ls /dev/gpt`
`% cat /etc/fstab`


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## mrtonyg (Jan 29, 2012)

wblock, thanks for taking the time!

No /dev/gpt directory.


```
office# ls /dev/gpt
ls: /dev/gpt: No such file or directory
office# cat /etc/fstab
# Device        Mountpoint      FStype  Options Dump    Pass#
/dev/ada2p2     /               ufs     rw      1       1
/dev/ada2p3     none            swap    sw      0       0
/dev/ada2p4     /var            ufs     rw      2       2
/dev/ada2p5     /tmp            ufs     rw      2       2
/dev/ada2p6     /usr            ufs     rw      2       2
office#
```


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## mrtonyg (Jan 30, 2012)

ISSUE FIXED

What I had not done was actually set the permanent labels. I followed here, specifically "Example 20-1" to set the labels using *glabel*. Now everything works! The question remains, why didn't I have a /dev/gpt directory?


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## kpa (Jan 30, 2012)

GPT labels are as permanent as the ones assigned by glabel(8), there should be a /dev/gpt directory with the newly created labels. The only reason I can think of why you're not seeing them right away is that the GEOM subsystem is not picking up the changes right away and either a reboot is needed or something like this should be run (this is what is needed to force GEOM to do what is called "retasting").

`# true >/dev/ada2`

If you did reboot after creating the partitions with GPT labels and you still didn't see the labels in  then I don't know.


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## hjj (Sep 24, 2012)

Although a few months have passed, and I want to tell you the answer.
View this thread
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2011-December/236438.html


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## wblock@ (Sep 24, 2012)

Short version: when those partitions were mounted by the existing fstab, the labels were hidden.


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