*BSD News Article 59675


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From: "Hanns B. Wetzel" <hbw@peg.apc.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Swap Space
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 13:38:29 +0000
Organization: InterBayNet
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CC: jkh@FreeBSD.org

Wanted to create some swap space by utilising some unused part of my DOS drive. I read the man
pages for swapn, fstab, diskpart and disktab but seem unable to find out how to partition and
label a drive (or part of a drive).

Then I used the fips.exe utility from DOS and partitioned off an unused portion of 36MB on my
C: drive. I then tried to use /stand/sysinstall from my Unix drive (FreeBSD 2.0.5) to partition
the freed part of the DOS drive, but to no avail. Finally I switched back to DOS, ran the
install utility from the FreeBSD cdrom, partitioned and labelled the DOS drive into wd0s1 (for
the existing DOS partition) and wd0s2 (for the new FreeBSD partiton) and proceeded to install a
minimal 15MB system on /. The installation began, but bombed out towards the end with an error
message something like "unable to install kernel.....etc., system will reboot", I didn't write
it down. 

The system rebooted and I had an extra option (F2 BSD), in my boot manager, but I by-passed it
and booted as normal from F5 BSD and everything came up fine. Then I edited the/etc/fstab file
to include a line referencing /dev/wd0s2 as another swap device and on subsequent bootup wdos2a
was installed as an additional swap device. It seems to test out OK with pstat -s and top when
running large applications like Netscape Beta 2 Rel. 3, xemacs, etc.

I described all of the above in detail not to show how clever (or dumb) I was, but to ask the
FreeBSD experts what the correct way of having done this would have been. Because obviously
what I did was not how it ought to be done. A description (or a pointer to a correct
description) of how it should be done would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,


Hanns Wetzel
Hervey Bay, Qld
Australia