Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 09:33:19 -0500 (EST) From: Glen Foster <gfoster@gfoster.com> To: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: *HEADS UP* Important change warning. Message-ID: <199803091433.JAA01741@gfoster.intr.net>
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I am seriously confused or, perhaps, not thinking too well today. Please forgive me if this is obtuse or repetitive but I do not understand much of the issues WRT the boot process and disk partitioning and find it difficult to understand much of the documentation, the recent advisory about the change, and subsequent messages on the -stable list. I have a sliced SCSI disk and I have entries in /etc/fstab that mount: /dev/sd0b /dev/sd0e etc. as swap or in various places. Is this what is meant by "compatibility mode?" If not, what is compatibility mode? Does compatibility mode apply only to partition "a" or all partitions referenced by the BSD label? Does this apply to SCSI disks or is it only an IDE disk issue? Will these no longer mount at bootup after the recent changes to mount, et. al. are incorporated? May one use the sd0[a-h] syntax with disks that are "dangerously dedicated" or should one assume that they are "virtually sliced" and use the slice syntax? If one always uses the slice syntax, does one always use slice 1 when there are not really any slices? Can one just change the sd0[b-h] references to, e.g., sd0s1[b-h] references and reboot with no ill effects? I am assuming that one needs the recent changes to mount to do this for sd0a -> sd0s1a. I administer geographically distant machines where I do not know if they are sliced or not. How can I tell which is the case? Fdisk(8) appears to show a DOS slice label whether or not a disk actually has one. How can I tell if I have no DOS partition table or an all-zeros DOS partition table? In playing around with the slice syntax for mounting partitions on a non-sliced SCSI disk I get warnings that what the BIOS thinks is the geometry is not what is in the BSD label. Will this cause me problems when I change from the sd0a to sd0s1a syntax? If you are mounting using the sd0s1[a-h] syntax can you still dump(8) with the sd0[a-h] syntax? Thanks for any clarification I can get, Glen Foster <gfoster@gfoster.com> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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