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From: unger@raindrop.seaslug.org (Thomas Unger)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: More Disk Travails
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 1996 00:14:36 GMT
Organization: Wet Weather Consulting
Lines: 48
Message-ID: <Dp5q0C.9Fo.0.raindrop.seaslug.org@raindrop.seaslug.org>
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs114-14.u.washington.edu
I recently had my own cause to curse disklabel and fdisk.
A company I work for wants to move files between unix systems and was
hoping to use an SyQuest 135 MB removable disk for this. I hooked it
up to a sun system and with little trouble formatted, newfsed, and
mounted the puppy. Then I brought it home to my FreeBSD system and
the troubles began.
Well, actually it didn't take me too long to decided that freeBSD
expects hard disks to have DOS type partition information, and there
isn't any on the sun formated disk. As near as I can tell, freeBSD
only works with DOS partion disks and there is no way to get freeBSD
to mount the sun-formatted disk. Right?
When I installed FreeBSD there seemed to be a point at which I could
have "dangerously dedicated" my disk to freeBSD. I assumed that
option would _skip_ the DOS partition information and directly write
the unix partition information on the disk. Was I wrong?
Also, would someone confirm my understanding: of the name sdAsBC
'A' refers to the SCSI driver, which gets mapped to a
controller/bus/SCSI ID either in the kernel config file (wired)
or dynamically at boot time (look at messages).
'B' is a number called slice, which refers to a DOS partition.
'C' is a letter which refers to a UNIX partition inside a slice (DOS
partition).
So we have two levels of partitioning here. Right?
Since I had all the right man pages open, I thought I would continue
investigation. I connected an older Bernoulli 90Mb removable disk and
tried to create a new file system there. After many iterations I was
able to disklabel the thing, adjust parameters, then partition it
(fdisk). But when I tried to newfs the disk I was told there was no
disk label. I could read the disk label off the disk (disklabel -r)
but I could not read it from the kernel (disklabel). Is this a
hardware or software problem?
In the mean time I'm going to recomend the stick with tape.
Tom.