I ran into an interesting problem last night ... that was very frustrating. I was recycling SCSI drives from some NetBSD machines (that were client boxes) to add to a RAID server running FreeBSD-5.0-RELEASE.
It's simply impossible to format NetBSD drives under current. Let me expand on that. /dev/da2 exists, but you can't say 'fdisk -I da2' ... fdisk says that /dev/da2 doesn't exist. /dev/da2 (and /dev/da2c) isn't writable, so I can't blank the first few sectors. I even tried this in single user mode. The problem appears to be that the FreeBSD-5.0 system sees the NetBSD label ... so things like da2s1 don't exist. da2a, da2b, da2c and da2g do. These are the NetBSD partitions. Writing to them is verboten. I was hoping that da2c would allow me to blank the boot sector, but it doesn't allow me to write. ... under FreeBSD-5.0, fdisk won't write to the disk and disklabel won't change the NetBSD label, either. I had to boot with my FreeBSD-4.7 recovery CD ... which would fdisk and disklabel the disk (note that fdisking wasn't enough ... FreeBSD still accepted the NetBSD label over the fdisk data) just fine. ... although I then ran into the issue that disklabel -e had /mnt2/stand/vi hardcoded into it ... which is wrong. Dave. -- ============================================================================ |David Gilbert, Velocet Communications. | Two things can only be | |Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | equal if and only if they | |http://daveg.ca | are precisely opposite. | =========================================================GLO================ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
