[ On Sat, October 3, 1998 at 02:40:30 (+0100), Roger Brooks wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Another changer, another changer problem
>
> Yes, but you can (and should) change the SCSI ID *before* you connect the
> disk to your system.  But what if you want to attach a disk with a label
> which collides with one on an existing disk.  Suppose you want to connect
> the system disk of a non-working machine to another system so you can examine
> it and work out what's wrong, and both are labelled "NetBSD_1.3.2".
> You can't change the label until you've connected it, and you can't connect
> it until you've changed the label.  You're stuffed!

In theory the driver should reject making devices available which have
clashing d_packname's, but it should *never* prevent you from reading
the label manually and manually blasting a new label onto the drive.

I.e. open(/dev/rsd0a) == ENXIO for both disks which clash, but opening
the default "full-disk" partition, or more specifically the "raw" disk,
aka open(/dev/rsd0), works fine.

I'd really love to see some /dev node that represents the *raw* disk,
ignoring any and all translations and partitioning.

Of course in the stupid world of the averate x86 PC BIOS you might also
want a device node that represents the "unix" fdisk partition so that
you can treat it as a logical volume and drop a normal disklabel into
it.  This would imply that one could have four (isn't that the fdisk
table size?) "unix" partitions and at least 8 filesystems per logical
volume, thus a median of 32 filesystems per spindle.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>