On Wed 04 Nov 1998, Mike Sienicki wrote:
> I made an entry into the disktab file exactly like the one Michael Brandt
> told me
> about and now I no longer get a complaint that disklabel doesn't know what
> the zip
> drive is, but, I still get the following:
> 
> # disklabel -w -r /dev/rsd1c zip
> Warning: Illegal 'bad sector list' format- assuming non exists
> Warning: unknown disklabel format- assuming empty disk

These messages are normal the first time around. You shouldn't see them
again after the 'disklabel -w -r'.

> I also typed the following to see what would happen (even though I probably
> goofed up
> the MSDOS format on the zip drive by doing this) and here is what I got:
> 
> # newfs -i 16384 /dev/rsd1c
> Warning: Illegal 'bad sector list' format- assuming non exists
> Warning: unknown disklabel format- assuming empty disk
> /dev/rsd1c:     196608 sectors in 96 cylinders of 64 tracks, 32 sectors
>         96.0MB in 6 cyl groups (16 c/g, 16.00MB/g, 1024 i/g)
> super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
>  32, 32832, 65632, 98432, 131232, 164032,
> read error: 48
> rdfs: Undefined error: 0

I checked the source about this error disgnostic. It means that a read(2)
system call does not return the requested number of bytes at once. Since
the newfs(1) probably tries to read 8192 bytes at once (blocksize) and the
hardware works in 512 bytes units, it seems pretty weird to bomb out on
this. You might try the block device...

While writing this, I am wondering if just following the INSTALL doc (4b)
- the part about edlabel - will not help you out.

Leo.