Hello, I have a -CURRENT from May 5th.
I recently bought a new 40 gig IDE disk and proceeded to install it. I went for "compatible" (as opposed to "dangerously dedicated") mode. I first used fdisk to initialize the slice table and create a FreeBSD slice that would take in the whole disk. After that, I proceeded to disklabel the slice thus created. This used to work just fine with a commandline like this: disklabel -B -w -r /dev/ad1s1 auto But now, although the kernel complaints about the disk not having a disklabel stopped, I could not edit the label I supposedly just created, with the command: disklabel -e /dev/ad1s1 After checking with fdisk, it turned out that the slice I created there (which was the first "partition" in DOS parlance) got deleted, and replaced by a very small (something like 24 megs) slice listed as the fourth primary. In addition, although up till then the kernel detected the disk's size properly on bootup, it got confused and guessed it was bigger than in reality. I deleted and started over, again, fdisk went fine, the slice got created, I could see it with fdisk, it spanned the whole disk, but after the disklabel we were back to square one. When doing it for the third time, I, for the heck of it, tried "disklabel -e" right after the "fdisk -Bi". And, to my great surprise, a disklabel *was* found on the slice, and it was even mostly correct, save for the fact that now it seemed to stick to the erroneous values for c/h/s and size that it snatched out of thin air previously. (Note: The bad values are not necessarily a bug. The BIOS has no opinion on the disk because it is too big for it. When it tries to detect it, the machine just hangs. So, it is set to "None" in the BIOS setup, which allows the system to boot, but obviously the BIOS hints are not there. Obviously, this is not the only disk in the system, and not even the system disk:-) I am aware of disklabel changes recently, the question is: Was this some sort of expected, or are these special fx only fata morgana on my machine, or...? In other words, has the recommended way of installing a disk in "compatible" mode into the system changed? Is fdisk somehow supposed to create a disklabel? And, is disklabel expected to mess with the fdisk tabales? (when it is used on a slice, not the whole disk) Any and all hardware details available if needed. Have a nice weekend! -- Regards: Szilveszter ADAM Szombathely Hungary To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
