On 22 Jun 2004, at 11:29 AM, Kurt J. Lidl wrote:

> In particular, the command:
>
> # disklabel -w -r -f /tmp/disktab sd0 'dorkfs'
> write: No such file or directory
>
> (where 'dorkfs' is what I told it to name the disk)
>
> If I try just:
>
> # disklabel -w -f /tmp/disktab sd0 'dorkfs'
>
> I don't get an error, but the label doesn't seem to get written
> to the disk (nor, should it be, on my reading of the manual page).

Hi, Kurt.

I can't say I understand what's going wrong here. I disklabel my disks 
all the time on my sparc64s, and I've never had problems like this. 
However, I don't use sysinst (I build to the target machine's disk), so 
I'll just offer some things to try.

First, I've never quite understood the -r option. I mean, I understand 
what the docs *say* it's there for, but it's often had the opposite 
apparent effect. In the end, I never use it. And it always works 
without it. In particular, the following sequence has always gotten me 
up and running in the face of otherwise impassable trouble:

     dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd0c count=1
     disklabe -e sd0

I always also use the -e option (to bring up $EDITOR), rather than use 
a file with the label contents in it. Out of habit. That may or may not 
be related to your difficulty.

Note the lack of '-r'. Also note that this works for me, despite that.

One last thing you might try is writing the disklabel in Solaris. The 
default disklabel format on Sparc hardware is the Sun PROM-compatible 
disklabel format, so that you can boot from the disk. Since the label 
format is identical, there's no real need to write it from NetBSD. Just 
convenience.

I understand that these suggestions do nothing to address the actual 
problem. But they might get you up and running.

- Geoff