Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 21:20:15 +1100 From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> To: mike@smith.net.au, stable@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: *HEADS UP* Correction to previous postings. Message-ID: <199803091020.VAA22972@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
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>Please note that in the recent postings regarding the changes to the >fashion in which the root filesystem is located and mounted there has >been a fundamental factual error on my part. > >This error *will* cause users with dedicated disks serious problems, >unless they adopt the same procedure require by non-dedicated disk >users. > >The error in this case was the assumption that partitions on a dedicated >disk were handled as though they were truly equivalent to the >compatability slice entries. A correct assumption. >This is not correct; rather they appear >as though they were in the first slice on the disk. Not with normal slice naming. The first slice (s1) doesn't exist on dangerously dedicated disks. Rev.1.88 of autoconf.c just breaks support for dangerously dedicated disks. Rev.1.87 was correct in this areas, except it spells COMPATIBILITY_SLICE as 0. I think the recent bug reports were for non-dangerously dedicated disks. Disks that have a valid partition table, with one big DOS partition covering the MBR, are not dedicated, just dangerous. Does sysinstall create these? Anyway, the update procedure for non-dangerously-dedicated disks applies to these disks. Dangerously dedicated disks are ones with no DOS partition table. These are created using normal BSD tools (start with a blank disk and run disklabel -B on it). The boot blocks contain a special invalid DOS partition table that is recognized as invalid. Alternatively, an all-zero DOS partition table is recognized as invalid. Someone broke the bugfeature of disklabel -B of overwriting the DOS partition table, so dangerously dedicated disks are not as easy to create as they used to be. Mine have an all-zero DOS partition table. The update procedure for dangerously-dedicated disks is to back out rev.1.88 of autoconf.c. Bruce To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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