From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Nov 20 21:21:37 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id VAA01444 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 20 Nov 1995 21:21:37 -0800 Received: from irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de [141.76.1.11]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id VAA01433 for ; Mon, 20 Nov 1995 21:21:26 -0800 Received: from sax.sax.de by irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with ESMTP id GAA23241; Tue, 21 Nov 1995 06:21:22 +0100 Received: by sax.sax.de (8.6.11/8.6.12-s1) with UUCP id GAA15335; Tue, 21 Nov 1995 06:21:21 +0100 Received: (from j@localhost) by uriah.heep.sax.de (8.6.12/8.6.9) id BAA14388; Tue, 21 Nov 1995 01:23:33 +0100 From: J Wunsch Message-Id: <199511210023.BAA14388@uriah.heep.sax.de> Subject: Re: Adding New Hard Drives: A Major Complaint To: lutz@muc.de (Lutz Albers) Date: Tue, 21 Nov 1995 01:23:32 +0100 (MET) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.FreeBSD.org Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) In-Reply-To: from "Lutz Albers" at Nov 20, 95 05:01:18 pm X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Length: 1930 Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk 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. ;-)