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Date:      Wed, 19 Feb 2003 11:08:50 -0500
From:      David Gilbert <dgilbert@velocet.ca>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Simply impossible to format disk under current.
Message-ID:  <15955.44050.529506.835464@canoe.velocet.net>

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I ran into an interesting problem last night ... that was very
frustrating.  I was recycling SCSI drives from some NetBSD machines
(that were client boxes) to add to a RAID server running
FreeBSD-5.0-RELEASE.

It's simply impossible to format NetBSD drives under current.

Let me expand on that.  /dev/da2 exists, but you can't say 'fdisk -I
da2' ... fdisk says that /dev/da2 doesn't exist.  /dev/da2 (and
/dev/da2c) isn't writable, so I can't blank the first few sectors.  I
even tried this in single user mode.

The problem appears to be that the FreeBSD-5.0 system sees the NetBSD
label ... so things like da2s1 don't exist.  da2a, da2b, da2c and da2g
do.  These are the NetBSD partitions.  Writing to them is verboten.  I
was hoping that da2c would allow me to blank the boot sector, but it
doesn't allow me to write.

... under FreeBSD-5.0, fdisk won't write to the disk and disklabel
won't change the NetBSD label, either.

I had to boot with my FreeBSD-4.7 recovery CD ... which would fdisk
and disklabel the disk (note that fdisking wasn't enough ... FreeBSD
still accepted the NetBSD label over the fdisk data) just fine.

... although I then ran into the issue that disklabel -e had
/mnt2/stand/vi hardcoded into it ... which is wrong.

Dave.

-- 
============================================================================
|David Gilbert, Velocet Communications.       | Two things can only be     |
|Mail:       dgilbert@velocet.net             |  equal if and only if they |
|http://daveg.ca                              |   are precisely opposite.  |
=========================================================GLO================

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