>>>>> "ns" == Nigel Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
ns> make a note of your hard drive and partitions sizes now, while
ns> you have a working system.
keeping a human-readable backup of all your disklabels somewhere safe
has helped me a few times. For me it was mostly moving disks among
architectures (i386, sparc, alpha), but even if it weren't for this
new and broken idea of boot firmware feeling entitled to ``write'' to
disks, there are already many label formats and many label readers and
writers just on a single x86 system which motivated that one-pager:
the Linux label writer becomes incompatible with the Solaris reader
because Linux disables the HPA, and the Linux reader is more forgiving
than the Solaris reader.
The other thing I don't like is that it's hard to tell under Solaris
the difference between a physically defective disk, and a disk where
Solaris ``doesn't like'' the label. There's no uniform Solaris
equivalent to Linux's unpartitioned device interface. And the solaris
label tools like fmthard, rmformat, format, prtvtoc, have a variety of
quiet and ambiguously reported reasons for refusing to operate with a
disk, and a bunch of undocumented command line flags and secret
environment variables.
Lastly shouldn't these bugs or ARC's or whatever:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/caselog/2007/660/onepager/
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=5044205
cover SATA framework drives and drives appearing with SCSI emulation
through mpt or mega_sas? Covering PATA only isn't much help. A
uniform ATA layer would be good for everyone---for keeping this HPA
work well-factored as well as making tools like hdparm, smartctl,
cdrecord work consistently.
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