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Date:      Fri, 5 Dec 1997 09:45:34 -0500 (EST)
From:      "Ron G. Minnich" <rminnich@Sarnoff.COM>
To:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   a strange problem with slices, 3.0-current, and disks
Message-ID:  <Pine.SUN.3.91.971205093353.14108A-100000@terra>

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I have a western digital IDE 3.2 GB disk that has three dos partitions,
which I want to blast to zeros and have be all-freebsd. With the normal
interactive install this works fine: I can dedicate the disk to freebsd,
and the dos parts get blasted and I end up with a nicely freebsd-dedicated
disk. In the past when not using the interactive install I have been able
to use disklabel on non-dos-partitioned disks to set them up as freebsd
disks, using
disklabel -f <myfile>
with a file I have set up for this purpose. 

But: I can't get this dos-partitioned disk written on 3.0-current!

For example, what doesn't work is the following:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rwd0 bs=512 count=128. 
dd reports one block in, zero out. 
The kernel prints three messages of the form:
wd0s1: type 0x6, start 63, end=4193279, size=4193217: OK
wd0s2: ....  different start and end and size: OK
wd0s5: ...  different start and end and size: OK

The kernel prints these messages every time I do anything to the disk. 
(read, write, whatever). I also can not
dd if=/dev/rwd0 | od -xc | more
dd gets an immediate EOF! rwd0 is not functioning as it used to. 

fdisk can't do anything with this disk either. What appears to be
happening is that any reference to rwd0 is somehow being redirected to the
4th partition on the disk, which is the only unused one, and which is also
zero bytes long: immediate error. 

I'm now very confused, and I hate to drop this on hackers, but: 
1) questions has resulted in only one (non-working) answer
2) This looks like a bug, or at least a big change in How Things Work

one more question: how does the install tool do it? how does the install 
tool blast the dos partitions, where is the ezboot that it loads onto the 
disk, and how does it get ezboot there? The install tool does not appear 
to use fdisk/disklabel, or if it does, it's using them in a way I don't get.

thanks
ron

Ron Minnich                |Java: an operating-system-independent, 
rminnich@sarnoff.com       |architecture-independent programming language
(609)-734-3120             |for Windows/95 and Windows/NT on the Pentium
ftp://ftp.sarnoff.com/pub/mnfs/www/docs/cluster.html 





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