Question about partitions

[WeeGraeme]

I setup FreeNAS version 9.1.1 in my HP Proliant N54L. It's booting from a 32GB USB stick. Inside case, I have 1 x 120 GB SSD, 2 x 2.0 TB HDDs and 2 x 500 GB HDDs. It was working fine. The upgrade to 9.2.0 came out. I upgraded and found I no longer had access to any partitions

I reconfigured the partitions and was able to access them. The only issue was that the "Alert Status" indicater only showed the SSD and not the HDDs it had previously shown. I upgraded to 9.2.1 and each upgrade since, so I'm now at 9.2.1.3 Once again, the hard drive configuration was lost. When I go back to reinstall them, under "Storage > Volumes > Import Volumes" there are more partitions than I've ever created.

I'm currently using each drive as a separate volume, but when I go to import the volumes, here are the options I have to choose, listed in the order in which they appear:

ada2p2 (498.0 GB)
ada3p2 (498.0 GB)
ada0p1.eli (2.1 GB)
ada1p1.eli (2.1 GB)
ada2p1.eli (2.1 GB)
ada3p1.eli (2.1 GB)
ada4p1.eli (2.1 GB)
ada0p2 (2.0 TB)
ada1p2 (2.0 TB)
ada4p2 (117.9 GB)

I'm a noob to FreeBSD / Linux / Unix which means I don't even know the terminology I need to know or I'd look it up myself.

I assume that ada0 to ada4 are the physical hard drives and p1 / p2 are partition numbers. What I'd like to know is why there are two partitions on each drive when they're used just for storage? What are all the partitions with .eli in their names? I'm guessing it's not just coincidence that they're each 2.1 GB. None of the .eli partitions were there when I created the volumes the first time, so I'm curious to know where they came from.

I hope this is clear enough to explain what I'm asking. Please let me know if I need to clarify anything.

 

[dlavigne]

See the explanation at http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...ces-did-something-go-wrong.19664/#post-110327.

 

[WeeGraeme]

Thanks.

Judging by that, the .eli partitions were created by a programme called GELI. I googled that and found that it is disk encryption software. That surprised me as I deliberately steered clear of encrypting anything while I'm still new to it. It was interesting that as I added each partition by selecting the p2 partition, the corresponding p1.eli partition disappeared.

It sometimes seems like the more you learn about this, the less you understand.

 

[ser_rhaegar]

P1 is the swap partition on each drive (2GB by default). These are always encrypted, regardless of whether or not the pool is encrypted.

 

[WeeGraeme]

P1 is the swap partition on each drive (2GB by default). These are always encrypted, regardless of whether or not the pool is encrypted.

Thanks for letting me know that. That makes much more sense to me now.