From owner-freebsd-current  Fri Aug  6  1: 2:20 1999
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Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1999 18:01:51 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199908060801.SAA14585@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: bde@zeta.org.au, phk@critter.freebsd.dk
Subject: Re: junior-hacker task: "prepdisk"
Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG, imp@village.org
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>>>It differs in that you can boot from the disk afterwards with my script,
>>>you cant with disklabel -w wd0 auto.
>
>>That may be because you forgot to supply the -r or -B args to disklabel,
>>[...]
>
>No it is because the fool BIOS belives the 50000 in the MBR.

This problem can be avoided by using fdisk to install a proper MBR
before running disklabel.  disklabel will then avoid writing to the MBR.
fdisk even has reasonable defaults, but not what you want.  Its default
seems to be to create a proper MBR with slice 4 starting at sector 1
(0-based) and having size (size of disk rounded down to a fdisk's idea
of a cylinder boundary) - 1.  You want start 0 and size (size of disk).
Of course, BIOSes could reasonably consider this partition as garbage
since it overlaps the MBR.  Similarly for partitions with start 1,
since they overlap the first track.

Bruce


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