Simon Morgan wrote: > J.D. Bronson <jbronson <at> wixb.com> writes: >> I think if I zero'd the drive 2x before install OBSD, this problem >> wouldnt have happened. > > Thanks for the tip but I have other operating systems and partitions > on the drive which I want to keep. > > I shouldn't need to do this should I? I mean, shouldn't fdisk and > disklabel make sure that the partitions are in a sane state? Should > I file this as a bug?
No, fdisk and disklabel are not there to "make sure that the partitions are in a sane state". That's your job. disklabel and fdisk are there to do your bidding, regardless of sanity (or hair loss it may later trigger). However, they do try to make your life easier sometimes. I *think* that may be what is biting you here. I am guessing that they see the other partitions you have on this disk already, and are trying to make them into usable, mountable disklabel partitions...but it is choking on something. Solution should be pretty easy, I think: boot single user (or even multi-user, as it doesn't seem to be a problem for you at the moment, right?) and do a "disklabel -e wd0" and delete the lines corresponding to the "unwanted" partitions. Oh, I think I see what it is choking on... > disk: ad4s1 > disk: ad0s1 Isn't that FreeBSD naming convention? It looks like you had FreeBSD on this system, removed it, put OpenBSD on the same partition, and OpenBSD saw and tried to use the FreeBSD disklabel, and choked on some of it. If that's the case, using the 'D' command of disklabel in the '-E' mode (mini-editor) before installing OpenBSD should resolve the problem nicely by nuking any existing label and starting from scratch. However, if you have started to use the OpenBSD partition, the above "disklabel -e wd0" suggestion still stands. Just edit out the cruft. IN GENERAL, you are right, you should not need to zero a disk before using it. On the other hand, there are some complicated interactions that I know I don't understand fully that can be solved by a Zero-write process if you don't know a better way to fix a problem. But I am pretty sure they can all be solved in more elegant ways. :) Nick.
