PC-BSD 9 question

[windtalker]

I was having problems that related to ram/swap. My screen would intermittently freeze for a few seconds then be fine, then freeze again. It was like I had numerous programs running at once overloading the system., which I didn't. demsg said everything was fine. Out of curiosity I booted to gparted to look at my partition to see if I had swap and could enlarge it. I had one huge 250 gig partition. Thats' all. I deleated the partition and reformatted it, then reinstalled PC-BSD 9 and got the same exact result. Btw, I allowed the dvd to decide the partition scheme.
I may be an old linux guy but I know PC-BSD requires more than one partition. I also didn't have this problem running the testing releases. I double checked the download against the md5 and burned with Brasero @ 4x. [Maybe 8x, can't recall now.]
I gotta have my box and moved to Fedora for the time being. Any idea's as to why the installer wouldn't give me the default partitions?

[thnewguy]

I'm not 100% sure, but it sounds to me like a case of the difference between partitions and slices cropping up. FreeBSD (and PC-BSD) handle disk layout a little differently than Linux. The BSDs will create one partition and then divide that partition into separate pieces. Like partitioning a partition. So I suspect GParted was seeing the one giant partition without seeing its sub-divisions, which probably included a root partition, swap and /usr mount points.

Have you tried manually partitioning the disk using the PC-BSD installer? You could take the suggested layout and then make changes to it to better suit your needs.

[windtalker]

I used Gparted to look at the partioning scheme when I was running 8 and it picked it up. I've had ram sticks go bad before and what I was experiencing was very similar. I allowed the installer to do it's own thing on auto since I don't understand the BSD's,,,,,,yet. I like the heck out of PC-BSD but with my machine it seems, there is something wrong with the installer. Nearly every time I install there is a quirck.

[commonloon]

"thenewguy" is exactly right.

The default installation will create one giant primary partition (called a "slice" in BSD talk), and then subdivide that primary partition into sub-sections (called "partitions" in BSD talk, which is of course confusing to others).

To verify that you do in fact have these separate BSD "partitions", simply drop to a terminal and do a "cat /etc/fstab". Ther you will see the device names of these "partitions" and what they are used for - "swap" will be there, among others.

[windtalker]

I understand partitioning rather well. I've been running Linux for about the last ten years and set my own partition scheme when I do run Linux. What I am trying to say is there was no seperated swap, / nor anything else visible on my hd. Just one huge 250 gig primary partition which I would have to assume was / since the system functioned. It was just sluggish because only 512 megs of my 1 gig of ram was only being seen.
For a fact it wasn't anything to do with my hardware since I'm now running Fedora XFCE with the partition scheme I set up by hand and everything is functioning as it should.

[commonloon]

You do know, then, that PC-BSD will not create primary partitions? During installation, all those "Add partition", "Remove partition" buttons are not referring to primary partitions. Anything you do with those will not show up with gparted. Those buttons do not have the same effect as when partitioning disks with a typical Linux installer.

Instead, they are for creating BSD "partitions", which are not primary partitions at all. They are sub-divisions of a primary partition, invisible to gparted, or fdisk etc.

If you don't use those buttons, the same thing is done, only by default. Your one big primary partition will be subdivided into smaller sub-divisions as follows:

2 gb - /
2 gb - /var
2 gb - swap
244 gb - /usr

This table is not stored in the Master Boot Record at the beginning of the disk. Instead it is stored in the first few sectors of the primary partition itself, in what is called a BSD disklabel. To see it, drop to a terminal in PC-BSD and use the "disklabel" command. Read the man page first to be sure you are displaying only and not writing a new disklabel inadvertently.

So the slowness of your system was not due to a lack of swap space. It was there. Only thing I can think of at the moment is ZFS - you didn't choose that, right? Cause it would be too heavyweight for a 1 GB RAM system.

All this is explained much better than I can, in the handbook. Hope this helps a bit and encourages you to give it another shot.

[Martillo1]

Here goes my 'gpart show':

# gpart show
=>        63  1953525105  ada0  MBR  (931G)
          63        1985        - free -  (992k)
        2048  1911578000     1  ntfs  [active]  (911G)
  1911580048          35        - free -  (17k)
  1911580083    37748655     2  freebsd  (18G)
  1949328738     4196430        - free -  (2.0G)

=>        34  1953525101  ada1  GPT  (931G)
          34         128     1  freebsd-boot  (64k)
         162        1854        - free -  (927k)
        2016     2097152     2  freebsd-ufs  (1.0G)
     2099168    29360128     3  freebsd-swap  (14G)
    31459296  1922065839     4  freebsd-zfs  (916G)

=>     63  3915713  da0  MBR  (1.9G)
       63       65       - free -  (32k)
      128  3915648    1  ntfs  (1.9G)

=>        63  2930277105  da6  MBR  (1.4T)
          63  2930272002    1  ntfs  (1.4T)
  2930272065        5103       - free -  (2.5M)

ada0: Windows + PC-BSD swap (this last set by hand)
ada1: PC-BSD
da0: USB pen for ReadyBoost in Windows
da6: External USB disk.

As you can see I have a swap partition in ada1, set up by the installer. However I do not use it and set up the ada0 one. But the installer put it in the PC-BSD disk.

BTW, the disk layout changed a lot from 8.2 to 9.0. bsdlabel is no longer used in favour of gpart, hence there is no more good old slices/partitions schizofreny.

[windtalker]

Here goes my 'gpart show':

Code:

# gpart show => 63 1953525105 ada0 MBR (931G) 63 1985 - free - (992k) 2048 1911578000 1 ntfs [active] (911G) 1911580048 35 - free - (17k) 1911580083 37748655 2 freebsd (18G) 1949328738 4196430 - free - (2.0G) => 34 1953525101 ada1 GPT (931G) 34 128 1 freebsd-boot (64k) 162 1854 - free - (927k) 2016 2097152 2 freebsd-ufs (1.0G) 2099168 29360128 3 freebsd-swap (14G) 31459296 1922065839 4 freebsd-zfs (916G) => 63 3915713 da0 MBR (1.9G) 63 65 - free - (32k) 128 3915648 1 ntfs (1.9G) => 63 2930277105 da6 MBR (1.4T) 63 2930272002 1 ntfs (1.4T) 2930272065 5103 - free - (2.5M)

ada0: Windows + PC-BSD swap (this last set by hand)
ada1: PC-BSD
da0: USB pen for ReadyBoost in Windows
da6: External USB disk.

As you can see I have a swap partition in ada1, set up by the installer. However I do not use it and set up the ada0 one. But the installer put it in the PC-BSD disk.

BTW, the disk layout changed a lot from 8.2 to 9.0. bsdlabel is no longer used in favour of gpart, hence there is no more good old slices/partitions schizofreny.

Was unaware of the changes. Still "top" should have showed any swap being used. It didn't. It only showed my mem was near maxed out and all I had running was xorg [and normal system things]. Other than that, pidgen and my terminal were open. I installed 8, each of the 9 rc's and 9 final the exact same way. I reinstalled 9 about 4 times before giving up and moving on to something else. I maintain there is something with the installer being used that may not like something about my Maxtor 250 gig ATA. This occurrence resembles the problems I had getting Xsane to install correctly.

[commonloon]

Martillo1, thanks for updating me on the new possibility for disk layout. I have been deselecting the GPT checkbox on he installer because I have old hardware. As a result, my gpart still shows the old BSD disklabel and sub-partitions, and still works with the disklabel/bsdlabel commands.

I thought the only advantage with GPT was for filesystems > 2 terabytes, but I see it also allows for a far greater number of "primary" partitions than the MBR did. I also saw that GNU parted recognizes GPT disks too. I'm really out of date.