From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Dec 5 11:12:59 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from odin.ac.hmc.edu (Odin.AC.HMC.Edu [134.173.32.75]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1B25337B422 for ; Wed, 5 Dec 2001 11:12:37 -0800 (PST) Received: (from brdavis@localhost) by odin.ac.hmc.edu (8.11.0/8.11.0) id fB5JCak07092; Wed, 5 Dec 2001 11:12:36 -0800 Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 11:12:36 -0800 From: Brooks Davis To: Terry Lambert Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: marking disks Message-ID: <20011205111236.B21593@Odin.AC.HMC.Edu> References: <20011204175626.A21463@Odin.AC.HMC.Edu> <3C0DD6CB.F76666D0@mindspring.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-md5; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="NDin8bjvE/0mNLFQ" Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <3C0DD6CB.F76666D0@mindspring.com>; from tlambert2@mindspring.com on Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 12:11:55AM -0800 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG --NDin8bjvE/0mNLFQ Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 12:11:55AM -0800, Terry Lambert wrote: > Brooks Davis wrote: > > What I'd been thinking was that I could write a magic string over the > > beginning of the MBR since I'm never going to try and boot these disks. > > That would let me detect uninitalized drives as well as out of date > > partitioning schemes. Are there any problems to look out for with > > this solution? Does anyone know of a better one? >=20 > It would be easiest for you to create a partition table on the > disk, and steal a table entry with a "magic" partition type to > indicate that either the LBA or CHS data was actually version or > type information, etc.. The thing I'm worried about there is that some "smart" bios or os might sanity check the values and refuse to work with the drive. Is that a likely scenerio? -- Brooks --=20 Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE. PGP fingerprint 655D 519C 26A7 82E7 2529 9BF0 5D8E 8BE9 F238 1AD4 --NDin8bjvE/0mNLFQ Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8DnGjXY6L6fI4GtQRAtD3AKC6IyHRXNYSxgqSy8E8g7ThQbwKxwCcCtCa j3Rj2Gd5wwQvvzOgdQwAT+o= =+xn3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --NDin8bjvE/0mNLFQ-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message