From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Feb 19 8: 8:57 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C9E4937B401; Wed, 19 Feb 2003 08:08:55 -0800 (PST) Received: from sabre.velocet.net (sabre.velocet.net [216.138.209.205]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B7C6E43F75; Wed, 19 Feb 2003 08:08:54 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dgilbert@velocet.ca) Received: from trooper.velocet.ca (trooper.velocet.net [216.138.242.2]) by sabre.velocet.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id BC5F713820C; Wed, 19 Feb 2003 11:08:53 -0500 (EST) Received: by trooper.velocet.ca (Postfix, from userid 66) id 8958D74337; Wed, 19 Feb 2003 11:08:53 -0500 (EST) Received: by canoe.velocet.net (Postfix, from userid 101) id A91F7567603; Wed, 19 Feb 2003 11:08:50 -0500 (EST) From: David Gilbert MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15955.44050.529506.835464@canoe.velocet.net> Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 11:08:50 -0500 To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Simply impossible to format disk under current. X-Mailer: VM 7.07 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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================ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message