Patrick Useldinger wrote: > > Otto Moerbeek wrote: > > >> I read through the mailing list archives and found a thread > explaining that > >> the disklabel is stored around the beginning of partition 'a' > and that one > >> should allocate a small partition 'a' which should not be made > part of the > >> JBOD. > > > > I think you misread. It's enough to make sure the a partitions starts > > after the first track. Just run fdisk -i on a new (ccd) disk. It > > takes care of that. > > I am talking about the physical disk, not the ccd disk. > > In this case, the physical disk is wd1, which has been initialized by > fdisk -i. I then created wd1a and wd1b. wd1's disklabel gets put into > the beginning of wd1a if I understood correctly. Because when I create > ccd0 with wd1a and wd1b as members, ccd0 has the same disklabel as wd1. > > >> What I am uncomfortable with is that > >> > >> 1) this does not appear to be documented in the man pages anywhere > > > > http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#disklabel > > > > True, the FAQ is not 'offcial documentation'.... > > To me it is. But the information isn't there. What comes close is > disklabel(5) which states: > > "The label is located in sector number LABELSECTOR of the drive, usually > sector 0 where it may be found without any information about the > disk ge ometry. " > > "Usually sector 0" is a little vague. > > Still confused, > -pu
I'm far from an expert, but seems like OpenBSD manages to run on more than one architecture. Some of these even do something intelligent like having more than one way to bootstrap from disk, which has to be equivalent to having some means of chosing which hardware sector to boot from. Easiest way to test (assuming i386) is to do a DOS FORMAT /MBR
