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To: Wes Morgan <morganw@chemikals.org>
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Cc: Marcel Moolenaar <xcllnt@mac.com>, current@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: GEOM and moving to CURRENT from 7.1
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On 2009-01-15 23:42, Wes Morgan wrote:
>>> I can confirm, that wiping out the partition table (but not the boot
>>> code), using "bsdlabel -B /dev/ad0s1", makes "s1" disappear.  Subsequent
>>> boots can then be done from /dev/ad0a, and this works both for "old"
>>> kernels, e.g. from before r186240 and after.
>> Thanks *very* much for testing! It's important that we
>> get the details right, so that we can consider adding
>> code to help in the migration and fix whatever is broken.
> How did so many people (myself included) end up with invalid disk labels? 
> Sysinstall?

Please note that I was talking about "dangerously dedicated" disks.
There are probably two separate problems here:

* Dangerously Dedicated: sysinstall writes a partition table, and uses
ad0s1[a-z] or similar, while it should use ad0[a-z].  I'm not sure how
often this will occur, since most people will go for the normal
partitioning scheme.

* Normal partitioning: sysinstall can apparently write incorrect
geometry into the partition table and/or disklabel, leading to
"geometry does not match label" messages, and possibly causing root
devices not to be found.