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Date:      Sat, 3 Apr 1999 15:02:16 -0500
From:      Simon Shapiro <shimon@Simon-Shapiro.ORG>
To:        Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com>
Cc:        freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: disklabel
Message-ID:  <9904031503150Q.22286@nomis.simon-shapiro.org>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.05.9904031029180.65636-100000@herring.nlsystems.com>

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On Sat, 03 Apr 1999, Doug Rabson wrote:
>On Fri, 2 Apr 1999, Simon Shapiro wrote:
>
>> Is it my imagination or lack of attention, or a problem?
>> 
>> It appears that if I disklabel a drive on a PC, the label will not be
>> visible on an Alpha?
>> 
>> Why do that?  Linux fdisk (on the alpha) is a bit broken, so I thought
>> to disklabel on a PC and move the disks.  No cigar.
>> 
>> So, either this is the case, or the two are so incompatible that they
>> write/read totally different areas on the disk.
>> 
>> BTW, Linux thinks that there is partition 4 on the disks.  fdisk on the
>> FreeBSD-i386 side confirms that.
>> 
>> Yes, I followed the handbook guide and wiped out the first megabyte of
>> /dev/da16, then disklable -Br, etc.  No cigar.
>
>The disklabel lives in different places on the two architectures. For
>i386, it is at block 1, offset 0 and for alpha it is at block 0, offset
>64. This is mainly for compatibility with OSF1 and NetBSD but it makes
>some kind of sense since the first block isn't cluttered up with
>executable code on the alpha.
>
>To add to the fun, disklabel -Br does completely different things on the
>alpha (like installing alpha executables instead of i386 ones...).

Figured as much :-)

Question still remains how to make a diskpack compatible between the
two?

There are several uses to this, clustering being not the least of them.

Sincerely,

Simon Shapiro
Research Fellow                               ShapiroS@MindSpring.com
MindSpring Enterprises, Inc.                   404.815.0770 ext. 2057



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