Bryan J. Hong - Building a Server with FreeBSD 7

To begin configuring the new drive, type sysinstall at the command prompt. You will be taken to the main menu. Scroll down to Configure and press [enter].

Select Fdisk and press [enter]. A dialog asking you to select the drive will appear. Select the appropriate drive and press [enter] (the new drive will probably be the second in the list with a name like ad1 or ad2). A warning message may appear explaining that your drive geometry is incorrect. FreeBSD will automatically adjust this, so press [enter] to continue.

You are now in the FDISK Partition Editor. Press A to automatically partition and then press W to write changes. A dialog will appear saying that this should only be performed on an existing installation and asking if you are sure you want to do this now. Confirm that you are modifying the correct physical drive by checking the upper left corner, where the disk name is displayed. If you are ready to erase the drive, select yes and press [enter]. A dialog asking if you want to install a boot manager will appear. Select none and press [enter]. The next dialog will say that the operation was successful. Press [enter]. Type Q to quit FDISK.

You will be returned to the Select Drive menu. Select cancel to return to the configuration menu. Select exit by pressing X and then [enter]. You will be at the sysinstall Main Menu; press X again to exit (you need to exit sysinstall for the changes to take effect).

You will be at the command prompt at this point. Restart sysinstall by typing sysinstall . Select Configure and press [enter]. Select Label and press [enter]. A dialog asking you to select the drive will appear. Select the appropriate drive and press [enter] (this will be the same drive you selected in step 2). The disk label editor will now appear. Press C to create a partition. A dialog will appear asking you to specify partition size. To use the whole drive, press [enter]. The next menu will ask you what type to create. Choose fs and press [enter]. The next prompt will ask you for a mount point (directory name). Type one of your choice ( /backup , for example; don't use the name of a directory that already exists because sysinstall will mount the new partition on top of it) and press [enter]. To finalize the changes, press W . The same dialog you saw in FDISK will appear. If you are ready, select yes and press [enter].

Write down the partition name(s) and the corresponding mount name(s); you will need this information in the following steps. When you are ready to continue, press Q to quit the label editor. You will be returned to the select drive menu. Select cancel to return to the configuration menu. Scroll up to exit and press [enter]. Select exit install and press [enter]. Your newly configured drive should now be mounted and ready for use.

The /etc/fstab file needs to be modified so that your new hard drive will mount each time the system starts. Open /etc/fstab :

Add a new line and insert the partition name you wrote down in step 6. You'll need to precede the partition name with /dev/ . You'll also need to insert the mount name you used in step 6 under the mountpoint column. The remaining columns can be set to the values shown below:

Save and exit. The new drive should now mount automatically at boot time.

After typing adduser at the command line, you will be prompted for a username. This is the login name; you can use any convention you like, but we are just using the first name in this example. Note that usernames are case sensitive, meaning john is not the same as John .