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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!torn!maccs!mcshub!csx.cciw.ca!u009 From: u009@csx.cciw.ca (G. Stewart Beal) Subject: Re: BEWARE: stupid placement of swap space... Organization: Canada Centre for Inland Waters Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 13:41:21 GMT Message-ID: <1992Sep30.134121.23744@csx.cciw.ca> Keywords: (or: Don't be stupid like me :-) References: <47897@shamash.cdc.com> Lines: 27 In article <47897@shamash.cdc.com> pbd@runyon.cim.cdc.com (Paul Dokas) writes: >Just a word of caution to anyone who installs swap space on extra >disk drives. I learned this the hard way and don't want anyone >to be as stupid as I am ;-) > >I borrowed a 1.0GB SCSI drive so that I could build X11R5 and have some > >...... deleted > >Everything is now fine. By the way, the reason for not putting swap >first was given to me by a gentleman from Germany (sorry I've forgotten >your name :-( It turns out that the first few sectors of a SCSI drive >are used for partition information. A filesystem will not use the first >few sectors of it's partition (knowing about the reserved blocks). But >a swap space will eventually overwrite the partition information, thus >causing strange things to happen. > Does this mean even if the swap partition is specified to start at cylinder 1 or 2? Does the swap creep, or just want to use block 0 of the partition starting at cyl 0? If so, it sounds like an "off by one" boundary bug. Regards, Stu Beal, VE3MWM, U009@CS.CCIW.CA, National Water Research Institute, Burlington, Ontario, Canada. "We'd made it through yet another nuclear winter and the lawn had just trapped and eaten it's first robin." - Kyle J. Spiller