On Thu, Aug 03, 2000 at 03:31:05PM -0400, Bob Drzyzgula wrote:
> 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.
It is mostly a convention, but if you don't keep at least one partition
starting at cylinder 0, you'll be in big trouble booting the machine
(because PROM like Solaris knows only about the partitions (slices), you
cannot open whole disk with it).
That's why that convention is enforced in RH 6.2.
Jakub
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