UFS MBR and GPT

[dreamerman]

I have an issue and hope someone can help. I installed pfsense 2.3 x64 and all is working fine. I am adding a spare SATA 160GB drive I had around the house for squid. Being a native windows user, I thought this is a simple matter but still no joy after spending the weekend trying to learn how to do it. I am running pfsense on an old DELL GX620 Dual Core. Basically:

1. Disk 0 (240GB SSD) where pfsense lives is ada0. I see it has MBR. No problem with ada0.
2. Disk 1 (160GB SATA) is installed but I do not see it using #gpart show. I can see it using SMART in pfsense.

Questions are:

- How do I activate it so that gpart can see it?
- Once activated can I set it as MBR instead of GPT? Reason I want MBR is so that it is consistent with ada0 unless GPT can work alongside MBR?

Thanks

 

[wblock@]

Drives appear in gpart show after they have been partitioned and show up to the GEOM system.

To see the hardware, look at ls /dev/ada*.

Now the question is what was on the 160G drive that is not a normal MBR or GPT. As root, file -s /dev/ada1 might tell. It might have mixed MBR and GPT partitioning on it, and is not showing up as a GEOM because of the conflict. It might have RAID metadata from use with motherboard RAID or a dedicated RAID controller.

Finally, GPT coexists with MBR. Most computers work fine with it. It works like MBR except there is no annoying four-partition limit.

 

[dreamerman]

wblock@ Thanks. The 160GB drive is just a blank drive I ripped from a deceased machine. Will read some more on how to deal with my issue. Cheers.