I've been working with Suns since the MC68010 Sun 2, and, while
it has always been a *convention*, and sometimes a setup
script will gripe if you try to delete it, I've never seen
evidence that there is anything about the hardware that will
cause an OS install to fail if it isn't there. Although I usually
leave it and I don't think I have any set up without it right now,
I'm quite sure that, out of desparation for another slice, I've
in the past set up SPARCs without the spanning partition. My
understanding has always been that the primary reason for it
was to make it possible to do a complete disk backup using the
dd command.
This does not mean that I know that RH 6.1 doesn't have some
design assumption that requires the presence of the spanning
slice, only that I believe that there is nothing about the
hardware that would have required such a design.
--Bob
On Thu, Aug 03, 2000 at 02:06:32PM -0500, Charles Fultz wrote:
> > I am throwing this question back to the maillist - can RH 6.1 be installed
> > without the third partition (spanning partition)? I don't see how it can
> > be, but I have no easy way to verify this one way or the other (can' access
> > RH manuals for RH 6.1 at current location)...
>
> I can't say for absolute, but I'm pretty sure that it must be present
> for ANY operating system (Solaris, NetBSD, Linux, etc.) to install on
> a Sparc.
>
> > BTW - why do you not want the spanning partition? It takes no space to
> > speak of?
>
> Originally, Solaris used it as a way to access ANY part of the disk.
> If the disk had the standard root, swap, and usr partitions, it could
> still get to any place on the disk using the 2 slice. That's how it
> works.
>
> Charles Fultz
> fultz
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