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Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 13:57:31 -0800
From: Luigi Rizzo <rizzo@icir.org>
To: stable@freebsd.org
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Subject: fdisk, bsdlabel and hidden tricks
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recently i was playing with fdisk and bsdlabel to create
a new FreeBSD slice (?) in the MBR on the same disk i
booted from, and later to create a slice and
create partitions on it on a second disk.
 
In both cases i had a hard time figuring out that
kern.geom.debugflags was needed to let fdisk work,
and probably some other magic that i haven't figured
out clearly (a reboot helped, but i don't know
why, and whether some kind of reprobe of the disk unit
could have saved the reboot) to let the bsdlabel do the work.

The fdisk manpages does not have any reference to geom.

The bsdlabel page does not say under what conditions one
can actually write the partition table to disk.

Anyone willing to help fixing the documentation ?
This is also missing in -current, but i think it is
more critical for 6.1-RELEASE given the larger user base.

	cheers
	luigi