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From: Clint Olsen <olsenc@smokey.ee.washington.edu>
Message-Id: <199510152322.QAA06660@smokey.ee.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: scsi(8) requested output here
To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith)
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 1995 16:22:35 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: hardware@FreeBSD.ORG, questions@FreeBSD.ORG
In-Reply-To: <199510130856.SAA18626@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Oct 13, 95 06:26:31 pm
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Hello:

> This has nothing to do with the MD21; you can't edit a disklabel if 
> there isn't one there yet.  You'll have to write one out first.
> 
> disklabel -w -r sd0 <random>

It would be nice if somewhere this little fact was DOCUMENTED IN
THE FAQ!!!!!  <-------  CLUE CLUE CLUE
 
You know, I really hate to bitch, but did it ever occur to anyone
that one might want to create a label by editing it first?????

> Pick a label at random from /etc/disktab, and then use disklabel -e to
> correct it.

Thanks for the heads up on this, but I would like to point out that
the above advice can cause problems.  Just picking any old random
entry from disktab caused us no end of grief.  You pretty much have
to get the values correct the first time you write the label because
disktab bitches when you try to relabel the disk (and will not let
you) when it happens to move the "c" partition significantly.  Once
we were able to clobber the existing label, using dd, we were able
to rerun disklabel.  We were forced to deal with the cryptic nonsense
of disktab.

So, is there a way to use scsi(8) commands to have a disk spew back
data about its physical characterstics (heads, sectors/track, blah 
blah)?

I just cannot imagine how much fun this would've been if I had 
intended to split up the disk between DOS and FreeBSD.

Thanks,

-Clint