Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 02:37:50 +1000 From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> To: mike@smith.net.au, phk@critter.freebsd.dk Cc: bde@zeta.org.au, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: junior-hacker task: "prepdisk" Message-ID: <199908021637.CAA08098@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
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>>> My semantics may be wrong on these two: what I'm talking about is
>>> what is in handbook chapter 8 "Using command line utilities " gives
>>> you a disk which doesn't boot.
>>
>>Ok; of those two examples, the first should give you a truly dedicated
>>disk. (You can only generate a "dangerously dedicated" disk with
>>sysinstall.)
The first gives a vanilla dangerously dedicated disk (one with a historical
bogus DOSpartition table of size 50000). Terminology for variants is less
standard, e.g.:
very dangerously dedicated:= dangerously dedicated with the DOSpartition
table and/or boot signature zeroed or otherwise clobbered.
undangerously dedicated:= dangerously dedicated with the DOSpartition table
fixed to cover the whole disk (including the MBR). This is very easy
to generate without sysinstall (just enter the start (0) and size for
one partition in fdisk(8)).
The second example is equivalent to the first except for bugs. Adding a
`disklabel -e' step would fix it but then it would be too equivalent to
be useful. The point of it is that the editing step can be inserted in
the pipeline. This is necessary to handle all cases except dedicated
ones.
Bruce
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