Re: x86 disklabels - again

["Thomas Mueller" <mueller6724%bellsouth.net@localhost>]

> On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 01:45:01PM -0800, Paul Goyette wrote:

> > Now, when I create the disklabel for this drive, should the raw-part
> > span the entire drive, or is it only for the NetBSD partition?  And

> 'd' spans the entire drive, 'c' spans the NetBSD partition.

> > should the partition offsets be relative to the start of the disk,
> > or relative to the NetBSD partition start?

> The offsets are absolute.  FreeBSD uses "BSD disklabels" with relative
> offsets, which is why we trash them...


>   Thor Lancelot Simon                                        
> tls%panix.com@localhost

"which is why we trash them":

That happened to me at least twice. 

First time, I didn't know what happened, thought there was something buggy in
my FreeBSD 7.2 installation, fortunately didn't have any ports installed.  So I
did a fresh install when FreeBSD 8.0 was released.

Second time, I had a lot of ports installed, but this time I had made copies of
fdisk partition table (Linux) and FreeBSD disklabel.  I also had the livefs CD
from FreeBSD 8.0, which I booted.  I was then able to restore the FreeBSD
disklabel and was back in action as if nothing had ever gone wrong.

I have seen a few posts on freebsd-questions%freebsd.org@localhost emailing 
list from
NetBSD-FreeBSD users who lost their FreeBSD disklabels because of overwriting
by NetBSD.

Add this to the troubles I've been having in NetBSD 5.x and -current with
screenblanking and with pkgsrc, I am now awful scared to attempt to install
NetBSD on a new computer where I would also run FreeBSD and Linux.

I think older versions of FreeBSD used whole-disk absolute-offset disklabel
like NetBSD and, I believe, also OpenBSD.

Tom