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Date:      Sun, 20 Apr 1997 10:23:24 +0200 (MET DST)
From:      Wolfgang Helbig <helbig@MX.BA-Stuttgart.De>
To:        imp@village.org (Warner Losh)
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: disklabel -- owner?
Message-ID:  <199704200823.KAA02207@helbig.informatik.ba-stuttgart.de>
In-Reply-To: <E0wIpNr-0007gZ-00@rover.village.org> from Warner Losh at "Apr 19, 97 11:41:54 pm"

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Hi,

> Is there an owner for disklabel?
> 
> I ask this because I have, over the years, grown to really really
> really loath having to deal with this program.  With all of its
> oddities, and you gotta set this right or that right, or or or or or.
> 
> So, I'd like to fix at least some of them. [...] 

Great! 
 
Yesterday a friend and me
installed FreeBSD 2.1.7 from WC-CDROM on a SCSI disk that
was used on a Macintosh before (i. e. w/o a DOS MBR) 

Installation paniced when it tried to write the partition tables to disk:
	"cannot go anywhere without init"
or something similar.

We tried twice -- with standard MBR and "dangerously dedicated"
selected.

Then we used LiLo -- Linux was living on another (IDE) disk -- to install
an MBR and partition table.
Linux and the freshly installed FreeBSD could read and write the SCSI disk,
but the kernel loaded by LiLo paniced with
	"cannot mount root"
(root was on sd0, the wdc-driver was disabled!)

It seems that during sysinstall and booting a geometry was used which is
different from the one used by the disk-kernel.

Finally we grabbed some DOS installation floppies, installed DOS, installed
FreeBSD booted with standard MBR and everything went fine.

This installation was really time consuming and it shows there is some
potential to improve fdisk, disklabel and sysinstall.

It would be great to install FreeBSD w/o the need to install DOS as a 
helper and to synchronize the ideas which sysinstall and the installed
kernel have about the disk properties.

Wolfgang



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