Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!spool.mu.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!eff!world!ksr!dean From: dean@ksr.com (Dean Anderson) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: HELP: wiped out my DOS partition Message-ID: <16808@ksr.com> Date: 12 Oct 92 19:28:01 EDT References: <1992Oct5.150129.27179@unibi.uni-bielefeld.de> <1apomrINNi8c@uwm.edu> Sender: news@ksr.com Organization: Kendall Square Research Lines: 41 > ha ha ha ha ha ha.. You did the same thing I did!!! > > The "d" partition cann't be used as a partition .. the 'd' >partition is the whole drive.. So even though you set it aside as 70meg >for unix. It actually was the first 70meg of your HD. Which is probably >where you dos is.. This shouldn't happen. The driver should look at the disk label and the partition table to determine the drive geometry. A bit of effort has gone into developing a common interface (the disklabel, /etc/disktab, and disklabel & diskpart commands) to avoid just these pitfalls. This just demonstrates that the device driver writer is really in control of the operating system. ;-) I am particularly disappointed with the changes to ufs_disksubr.c for dos partitions. This is supposed to be a machine independent file for use by drivers. (someone correct me if I am wrong) The PC BSD's should look at the dos partition table and create multiple logical disk drives, one for each partition. This has the following benefits: 1. Doesn't change machine independent code. This makes it easier to integrate future changes to BSD code, and contribute changes back to Berkeley. 2. Makes it possible to mount Dos "drives". A dos vfs is needed. 3. Makes it possible to ignore that dos exists and use the whole drive without a dos partition table. This is particularly attractive is you have a large disk, because dos will not work happilly with disks of greater than 1024 cylinders without a lot of egregious hacking which ultimately hurts ufs performance. --Dean -- Dean Anderson dean@ksr.com | I'm not voting because the KSR Computing Facilities | lack of a candidate has Kendall Square Research | co-opted me out of the process