On 12/12/25 13:44, brad wrote:
...
IMO, there is no need to run fdisk on a hard drive that's only going to
be mounted and used after the system has booted. disklabel -E and newfs
is enough.
And when you do not use fdisk, then the offset of partition a will be
zero and that is correct. No?
no. Big no.
Or...Do whatever makes you happy, but don't come whining here when that
bullet you are aiming at your own foot (er..data) finally strikes home.
On PC-descended designs, the first few blocks on your disk are reserved
for the disk partition table (MBR style partitions, not disklabel
partitions) and boot loader.
Doing *anything* other than that...such as your '0' based disklabel
partitions, is begging for a disaster when something assumes you
are doing things right.
OpenBSD is not designed for your use case. There are no promises that
it will always work. IIRC, there was some even a valid OpenBSD process
which would clobber the disklabel if you do this...I don't recall what,
but it all boiled down to people doing it wrong, losing their data and
whining about it. Plus every other OS and application has every right
to assume block zero is a boot loader and partition table.
All for 32k of storage. Not worth it. Not at all.
Nick.
