I created the disk without zeroing via the instructions in the 'Installing in Xen' guide from the Plan9 wiki (http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Installing_in_Xen/). If this is reproducable, it might be worth an update to the guide.
I used the following originally (copied from the guide): dd if=/dev/zero of=plan9.img seek=$((1024 * 1024 * 1024 - 1)) bs=1 count=1 It just zero's the last bit and allocates the rest as-is. Its instant, which is nice, but obviously gave me a garbage mbr and partition table. On 2/24/06, Russ Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Anyway, this is still a bug in my opinion. For the record, the drive > > geometry/size was WAY off in fdisk when I started. it said i had some > > like 4x 200GB partitions with free space in between. i wish ;) WHen i > > deleted them all, however, it accurately showed the free space size of > > 1gb flat. Might be related, might not be. Either way, the partitioner > > and mbr installer should not need a zeroed drive to work correctly. > > I agree, but how did you manage to create a new virtual disk that > wasn't zeroed? > > It is possible that if there is garbage on sector 0, then installing > the mbr will still leave the garbage in the partition table, > but now that there is an mbr fdisk will think the partition table > is okay, so you'll get weird-looking entries. > > However, this doesn't make sense, since you said that fdisk > said that the mbr was missing! > > Russ > > -- Jason Lash jason.lash (at) gmail.com
