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To: Heiko Schaefer <hschaefer@fto.de>
From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:10:57 +0200."
             <20030430140915.V27116@daneel.foundation.hs> 
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:53:21 +0200
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cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: gbde init -i issue 
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In message <20030430140915.V27116@daneel.foundation.hs>, Heiko Schaefer writes:

>> If it is a BSD disklabel or SUN label, change it so it starts at least
>> 16 sectors into the disk.
>
>hm ... i now use a partition that starts 16 sectors later and that problem
>is gone. great.
>
>... this solution disturbs me slightly, but i'll get over it :>
>why can't i use the space within a partition for anything i want to ?!

I havn't research this, but this is my best guess:

Back in the good old days, a VAX used the first N sectors for booting
from.  Accordingly, filesystems like UFS were designed to leave
some sectors at the front for the boot code, so the superblock lives
in sector 16 for UFS.  When disklabels were added, they retained
this bit of hackery, rather than fix it, probably in the name of
backwards compatibility.

Sun seems to suffer from the same issue.


-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.