From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Sep 20 15:33:09 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id PAA02090 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 20 Sep 1996 15:33:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from central.picker.com (central.picker.com [144.54.31.2]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id PAA02057 for ; Fri, 20 Sep 1996 15:33:04 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ct.picker.com by central.picker.com with smtp (Smail3.1.28.1 #3) id m0v4Drk-0004xOC; Fri, 20 Sep 96 18:16 EDT Received: from elmer.ct.picker.com ([144.54.57.34]) by ct.picker.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA13212; Fri, 20 Sep 96 18:14:25 EDT Received: by elmer.ct.picker.com (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4) id SAA27475; Fri, 20 Sep 1996 18:08:14 -0400 From: rhh@ct.picker.com (Randall Hopper) Message-Id: <199609202208.SAA27475@elmer.ct.picker.com> Subject: Re: fdisk changes, anyone? To: darrylo@hpnmhjw.sr.hp.com (Darryl Okahata) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 18:08:14 -0400 (EDT) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199609200653.AA284302404@hpnmhjw.sr.hp.com> from "Darryl Okahata" at Sep 19, 96 11:53:23 pm Reply-To: rhh@ct.picker.com Organization: Picker International, CT Division X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 PGP3 *ALPHA*] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk | 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