From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Apr 21 21:24:50 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com [24.2.89.207]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B675B14F48 for ; Wed, 21 Apr 1999 21:24:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com) Received: (from cjc@localhost) by cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (8.9.3/8.8.8) id AAA14618; Thu, 22 Apr 1999 00:22:14 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from cjc) From: "Crist J. Clark" Message-Id: <199904220422.AAA14618@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> Subject: Re: Using Raw wd In-Reply-To: from Doug White at "Apr 21, 99 11:13:55 am" To: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu (Doug White) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 00:22:14 -0400 (EDT) Cc: cjclark@home.com, danderso@crystalsugar.com, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Reply-To: cjclark@home.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL40 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Doug White wrote, > A hard disk has variable geometry and partition information in the > disklabel that is specific to the disk & slice. You'd have to regenerate > the disklabel as you were writing the chunk. The ?d driver does not do > the fixups necessary for this access mode to work correctly. Why can I do this with a SCSI disk, which in some sense, has an even more 'variable geometry?' I've read/written to Jaz drives (/dev/sd0) as raw devices with no ill effects. Isn't one of the most powerful aspects of UNIX flavored operating systems that devices are in some sense treated just like files? Or that most operations are transparent with respect to the hardware underneath? It'd be nice to be able to, $ tar cf /dev/st0 something/ $ tar cf /dev/fd0 something/ $ tar cf /dev/sd0 something/ $ tar cf /dev/wd0s4 something/ > In sum: don't do that :) *sigh* I've checked the disklabel on the slice and given /dev/wd0s4c a shot to and more Very Bad Things. I guess I'll have to put a filesystem on the partition. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message