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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msunews!uwm.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!zib-berlin.de!news.th-darmstadt.de!terra.wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de!zeus.rbi.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de!news.dfn.de!rrz.uni-koeln.de!RRZ.Uni-Koeln.DE!RRZ.Uni-Koeln.DE!news From: se@fileserv1.MI.Uni-Koeln.DE (Stefan Esser) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: disklabel -B has no effect. Date: 10 Dec 1994 20:56:01 GMT Organization: Institute for Mathematics, University of Cologne, Germany Lines: 40 Distribution: world Message-ID: <3cd4l1INN2nbq@rs1.rrz.Uni-Koeln.DE> References: <3c98u0$4st@whitbeck.ncl.ac.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: fileserv1.mi.uni-koeln.de In article <3c98u0$4st@whitbeck.ncl.ac.uk>, "A.M. Zanker" <A.M.Zanker@ncl.ac.uk> writes: |> I have a strange problem with the FreeBSD 2.0R disklabel utility. I |> installed the system on my 2nd IDE drive (a 170MB IBM model) and decided |> to edit the bootblocks to allow default booting from this drive. Having |> successfully edited and recompiled bootwd and wdboot I proceeded to |> install them with "disklabel -B wd1". However, the boot blocks on the |> disk were completely unaffected by this (as od -c /dev/rwd1c revealed). |> I tried a number of other incantations of the disklabel command without |> success. I also just had a problem with "disklabel -B" ... Just having finished the installation of FreeBSD and Win31 on a friends system (no I'd never put Windows on mine :), I tried to install the newest bootblocks (with -v support). Well, I better had made a backup of the BSD partition, since it already was customized, and was totally hosed ... :( DOS didn't boot anymore, and when I booted from floppy, I found, that the BSD partition table had been corrupted. (It now was an old version, that had a smaller root partition, repartioning the drive to the correct values made it mountable, but fsck threw away too many files, there must have been a write over meta data at my failed boot sector write ...). I guess this was due to changing the drive geometry parameters for the DOS install (the drive has 3117 cylinders, and I wanted to put the DOS partition on the inner tracks :). Seems the drive geometry and partition information is not kept consistent at all times (ie. disklabel found an old partion table and used it instead of the valid one). -- Stefan Esser Internet: <se@ZPR.Uni-Koeln.DE> Zentrum fuer Paralleles Rechnen Tel: +49 221 4706010 Universitaet zu Koeln FAX: +49 221 4705160 Weyertal 80 50931 Koeln