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Date:      Wed, 26 Jul 2000 08:42:25 -0600 (MDT)
From:      Fred Clift <fred@veriohosting.com>
To:        R Joseph Wright <rjoseph@mammalia.org>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: No /boot/loader (dangerously dedicated)
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0007260833370.68557-100000@vespa.orem.iserver.com>
In-Reply-To: <20000725171302.B9956@manatee.mammalia.org>

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On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, R Joseph Wright wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 25, 2000 at 03:29:08PM -0600, Fred Clift wrote:
> > On Sun, 23 Jul 2000, John Baldwin wrote:
> > 
> > > the geometry of a disk.  At the very least, dangerously dedicated mode
> > > should specify a valid length for the slice the way that truly dedicated

> Would you mind posting that script?  I'd like to see it.

I'm told that at least for some people that disklabel auto actually does
this as recently as 4.0-RELEASE -- I've not had a chance to verify this
but I know that using the da driver in 3.4 that this doesn't happen so I
do approximately the following (from a C program, that runs from a
pxe-like boot-rom booted kernel) note that only the important bits are
shown and some pseudo-code for clarity

fo = fopen(.......
...
fprintf(fo, "\n\n\n\ny\n\n\n%d\n\ny\n\ny\n",driveInfo[disk].size);
fclose(fo);

/* driveInfo[disk].size is the number of sectors/unit as reported by
disklabel */

/* and then this is done.... */

/sbin/fdisk -u da0 < /tmp/fdisk.in




This gets the right numbers in the disk label for me to make my Intel
ISP2150 boxes to work right (LB440GX+ based I believe).  


An interesting side note is that if I dd the stock boot0 (with the bogus
partition table entry) onto _any_ disk in the system, regardless of what
disk is the boot disk, then the machine wont boot at all, not a floppy,
not any of the boot devices, nothing.  I have to either low-level scsi
format the disk or boot from our custom bootrom and nuke it from
there...  I would say that any machine that can be crippled by having
corrupted data on a non-boot disk is by design broken.  But, thats another
discussion.

Fred

--
Fred Clift - fred@veriohosting.com -- Remember: If brute 
force doesn't work, you're just not using enough.



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