From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Apr 22 11:25:57 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from resnet.uoregon.edu (resnet.uoregon.edu [128.223.144.32]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 09FEA15058 for ; Thu, 22 Apr 1999 11:25:48 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu) Received: from localhost (dwhite@localhost) by resnet.uoregon.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA27801; Thu, 22 Apr 1999 11:23:10 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 11:23:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug White To: cjclark@home.com Cc: danderso@crystalsugar.com, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Using Raw wd In-Reply-To: <199904220422.AAA14618@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, 22 Apr 1999, Crist J. Clark wrote: > 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/ Don't use block devices, use /dev/r*. You may have better luck. > > 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. Have fun. Doug White Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | FreeBSD: The Power to Serve http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | www.freebsd.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message