Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 18:08:14 -0400 (EDT) From: rhh@ct.picker.com (Randall Hopper) To: darrylo@hpnmhjw.sr.hp.com (Darryl Okahata) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: fdisk changes, anyone? Message-ID: <199609202208.SAA27475@elmer.ct.picker.com> In-Reply-To: <199609200653.AA284302404@hpnmhjw.sr.hp.com> from "Darryl Okahata" at Sep 19, 96 11:53:23 pm
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| I thought about having an fdisk config database (analogous to
|/etc/disktab), but I don't think it'll work. I think people tend to use
|disks in one of two ways:
|
|1. Dedicate the entire disk to FreeBSD. We don't need an fdisk config
| database for this.
|
|2. Partition the disk up in "unusual" ways. Either an existing DOS
| partition is present, or the user wants to partition the disk "his
| way". The former can be handled without an fdisk config database
| (just use the remainder as a FreeBSD partition), and there are too
| many different possibilities in the latter.
|
|People with Zip or Jaz drives will probably dedicate the entire disk to
|FreeBSD, and so a special fdisk config database probably isn't
|necessary for these.
With your changes, fdisk is going to be a much nicer tool to work
with. As far as the fdisktab idea goes, I think your breakdown of usages
certainly covers it, and I agree that 1. is probably the only one that
could reasonably be covered by a config file. And there might not be
enough demand out there right now for fdisking removable media for one
large UFS partition to justify implementing it, so waiting to see sounds
like a good idea.
As for myself, my current make-ufs-zip script, which currently has in
it this nasty mess:
fdisk -u /dev/${DEVICE} << !EOF!
n y 165 1 196576 y 0 1 1 95 63 32 y y 0 0 0 n y y 0 0 0 n y y 0 0 0 n y
y 0 y y
!EOF!
(sed '/ /\n/' of course :-) along with a disklabel and newfs, will become
something like:
fdisk -u /dev/${DEVICE} -c - << !EOF!
165 1 196576 0 1 1 95 63 32
0
0
0
!EOF
(much nicer).
Though this isn't rocket science, I can see the benefit of having this
in a config file for newbies that just want to be able to store files on a
UFS ZIP disk and don't know or even want to know about how to set up what
cylinders, heads, and sectors go into their UFS slice. But as they'll
still want to build a script to pull the fdisk, disklabel, and newfs into
one convenient "just do-it" command, its arguable and not much extra effort
for them to just pull this script out of the mailing list archives.
Randall Hopper
rhh@ct.picker.com
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