Tried to manually setup my disks in order to install root FreeBSD on a ZFS mirror, but following the how-to’s available, I couldn’t get pass the first command.
gpart create -s gpt ad0
geom 'ad0': File exists
I tried deleting the partitions/slices, even doing a “dd of=/dev/null†on my drives. But I keep getting this file exists error, which is totally less-than-helpful. Google didn’t give me much help either, but it did lead me to other info which helped.
So… delete the partitions:
gpart delete -i 2 ad0 gpart delete -i 1 ad0
In the above, I only had 2 partitions, so you may need to add a line for “-i 3†if you had a third, fourth, etc. Also, in my case I was setting up a mirror on ZFS, so I repeated all these for both drives. (ad0 and ad2, for my system)
After that, there was a ONE EXTRA thing that was needed before the “gpart create†command would work. You need to “destroy†it!
gpart destroy ad0
I was finally able to runt he gpart create normally after that. If you had drives setup previously from another system, this was how I removed any partition info on them.
These are the sites I used as reference.
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=9777