On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, Nick Holland wrote:
> > PS I also don't understand why the first 16*512 bytes are
> > skipped when using "dd"?
>
> I was really hoping someone else would answer this, I'm not completely
> sure about my answer...I think that's where the PBR and the disklabel
> hides. Actually, I *know* it is the PBR, I'm guessing about the
> disklabel, but looking at the contents, I'm pretty sure I'm at least
> partly right.
Yes, you are right. Try disklabel -r /dev/rwd0a to read the disklabel
from the partition directly. It wil succceed for the a partition, but
not for the others.
Without -r, disklabel succeeds in getting the in core disklabel for
any partition, but that is behaviour of the ioctl, as documented in
diskabel(5).
Now I'm wondering where the label hides if there's no a partition....
-Otto
