Bob Nestor wrote:

> >i'd say quite possible.  well, at least something seems to be screwy, b/c
> >i've noticed that the more you mess with the partition map, the less
> >likely netbsd is going to be able to read the disk.  i resized and deleted
> >a couple of partitions on one of my disks, and i'm pretty sure i cannot
> >access the original netbsd partition on the disk now; it panics the
> >machine to do a disklabel on that drive :-(  i haven't looked at it in a
> >while now, tho.
> 
> This particular disk that's giving me fits was formatted on my PPC 
> machine using Drive Setup 1.5.  For some reason it has a tendency of 
> leaving a couple of danging "garbage" partitions on the disk much like HD 
> Setup does.  I'm also getting warnings from some of the other disk 
> formatters that the Partition Map has some "minor" problems.  Having 
> looked at this in the past I seem to remember that the Partition Map size 
> doesn't agree with the size actually allocated.  Too bad we (the NetBSD 
> "we") haven't been monitoring the disk formatter that folks have used 
> when they're reported problems with the utilities and NetBSD setup.  I'm 
> beginning to suspect that some formatters may be more prone to tripping 
> up NetBSD than others are.

hmmm...i used the patched version of HD SC setup for my latest install,
and it's been fairly flawless.  however, i did all of the partitioning at
once, my netbsd partitions are at the front, and i have an hfs partition
at the back.  the disk that is not behaving so well is a quantum fireball
formatted with FWB's HDT (PE), the netbsd partition(s) are towards the end
of the drive, and i've resized the partitions at least once.  i've another
drive that was at one point formatted with lacie's silverlining, but i'm
not sure how well it performed (that was over 2 years ago).
 
> Oh, scratch what I wrote about the transient I/O errors and the 
> Installer.  Just had the same round of errors on a brand-new disk drive, 
> so it's probably something else.

well, good luck in figuring out what it is.

later.

-- 
Colin Wood                                 cwood@ichips.intel.com
Component Design Engineer - PMD                 Intel Corporation
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I speak only on my own behalf, not for my employer.