Re: installboot killing disklabel?

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> Also note that â??label sectorâ?? and â??label offsetâ?? may be
> different between x86 and Alpha (I donâ??t recall off hand).

i386/amd64: LABELSECTOR=1, LABELOFFSET=0
alpha: LABELSECTOR=0, LABELOFFSET=64

At least in 5.2, and I would tend to assume those haven't changed in a
very long time.

> That would also cause problems (x86 would write it to the wrong
> location).

Indeed it would.

That was careless of me; the post said "trying to use an amd64 system"
and I didn't notice.  However, it does read as though the disklabel
mangling shows up on the original system.

I'd say the answer to the original question very probably is
"installboot -m alpha doesn't try to avoid damage to non-alpha
disklabels, ending up overwriting the x86 disklabel location".

If NetBSD/alpha uses disklabels compatible-enough with NetBSD/i386 and
NetBSD/amd64 disklabels, I have a program that can be used to create
the alpha disklabel on a non-alpha system; it can also set the kernel's
label, so you can use the resulting label to set up the filesystems.
ftp.rodents-montreal.org:/mouse/hacks/bsdlabel.c has the latest
version; if the above alpha values are still current, you'd want to run
it with "-block 0 -offset 64".

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