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From: muruga@iss.nus.sg (Janakiraman Murugavel)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.4bsd
Subject: Format Program
Date: 7 Sep 1995 03:51:39 GMT
Organization: Apple-ISS Research Center, ISS, NUS
Lines: 27
Message-ID: <42lq8b$6sp@holodeck.iss.nus.sg>
NNTP-Posting-Host: casper.iss.nus.sg
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]

Hi All,

  Recently i had a tough time of formatting new hard disk.  I think my
  experience may be useful to u all.

  When i tried to format /dev/sd1 it given the error message 
  "Warning : Current Disk has mounted parition", but the disk is not at
  all mounted. I returned the harddisk back to the vendor assuming it's
  not a new hard disk. The vendor returned hard disk back saying they able
  to format it and nothing wrong with the disk. When i tried to format it
  again i got the same message again.

  After tracing the format program i noticed the error message is displayed
  after reading "/etc/mtab" file.  When i looked into the "/etc/mtab" file
  i saw entry for "/dev/sd10g", "/dev/sd10h", "/dev/sd11g" but nothing
  for "/dev/sd1[a-z]".

  I had suspicious here and removed all the entries which has sd1 in
  it ( ie /dev/sd10g, /dev/sd10h, /dev/sd11g, etc ).  The format program
  when thru after this.  What my suspicion is instead of looking for exact
  match the format program does the pattern match in the "/etc/mtab" file
  & hence it failed.

  Any comments welcome.

  -Muruga
  muruga@apple-iss.iss.nus.sg