Date: Tue, 21 Nov 1995 01:23:32 +0100 (MET) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: lutz@muc.de (Lutz Albers) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Adding New Hard Drives: A Major Complaint Message-ID: <199511210023.BAA14388@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <v02140402acd6033e51cf@[193.174.4.22]> from "Lutz Albers" at Nov 20, 95 05:01:18 pm
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As Lutz Albers wrote: > > -sysinstall and libdisk are an entirely different thing. But believe > -it or not, all of us still use the terrible interface, except for a > -fresh installation... > > Then, if you don't mind, please give us the magic incarnations you need to > tame this awful two-headed beast (fdisk/disklabel). I generally ignore fdisk(8) entirely, since i don't know what a DOS partition is. :-) I setup a disktab entry, where the most important figure is the su# capability, telling the exact number of sectors the new disk has. (This number is announced at boot time.) The remaining "geometry" values are garbage anyway. Once su# is there, you can probably use pom(6) or random(4) to determine them... :) Finally, the disktab entry needs to be partitioned, according to the intented use of the disk. The `c' partition must start at offset 0, and extend to the very last block (su# - 1). Then, i run disklabel -r -w -B sdXX mydisktablabel This usually gives a single "bad magic" warning for the first time. Finally, run newfs for all file systems. Ignore all warnings about ``disagrees with disklabel'' (pre-2.1 newfs version), or about unallocated sectors (well, that's more serious, but for a 2-gig disk, i usually don't care about a lost megabyte). Poor BIOS-dependant users have to care for fdisk(8) as well. Use the same "geometry" as other systems on the same disk would use. Invent ficticuous ending sector/head/cylinder numbers if your BSD slice extends beyond the reach of BIOS. 63/15/1023 for example. No guarantee on this part, i think it's more than a year ago that i've had to setup a disk that was to be shared with other systems. Of course, for bootable disks, all that less than ficticuous cylinder 1024 mess applies. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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