Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 15:37:49 -0700 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: shimon@simon-shapiro.org Cc: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Show Stopper? Failure to Install 19981014 Message-ID: <199810162237.PAA02507@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 16 Oct 1998 18:18:07 EDT." <XFMail.981016181807.shimon@simon-shapiro.org>
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> > Jordan K. Hubbard, On 16-Oct-98 you wrote: > > > I am installing, from scratch, on a known-to-be-good system, FreeBSD > > > 3.0-CURRENT, the snapshot from 14-Oct (compiled here) and getting the > > > following error messages during filesystem creation: > > > > > > [ After newfs lists superblocks ] > > > > > > newfs: ioctl (WDINFO): cros-device link > > > newfs: /mnt/dev/rda0s4a cant rewrite disk label. > > > > FWIW, I've seen this reported by 2-3 other people as well (and not > > with DPT controllers) but I'm buggered if I can reproduce it here on > > any of my test boxes. Can you tell me a bit more about what > > installation > > type you're using, whether the disks are being installed "dangerously > > dedicated", are shared with other OSes, etc? > > I can reliablyreproduce it at will. > > Novice installation, creating an fdisk partition with 1 DOS partition in > da0s1a, a 1024MB type 165 in da0s2 and da0s3, and a 2GB+ (or whatever is > left over) in da0s4. > > Freebsd labls chop these into root, tmp, var, var/tmp, var/spool, var/log, > var/qmail, var/account, usr, usr/X11R6, usr/local, usr/local/pgsql, > usr/local/pgsql/data, home, SourceControl, Archives, and so on. > > If you want, drop me a line and I'll let you in to the machine in question. It appears to be caused by not entering the root filesystem first. There's a test in the disklabel code which checks to see if the partition you have open to write the label starts at 0, and if not then it defaults to the 'a' partition. Partitions are laid on disk in the order that you enter them. The 'a' partition is always reserved for the partition you mount on /. If you don't enter this partition first, it won't be at the beginning of the disk, and any attempt to rewrite the disklabel will fail. Due to the way that sysinstall interacts with libdisk, this is difficult to get "right". We probably need a bandaid which insists that if you want to create an 'a' partition you must lay it down first. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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