Re: NetBSD explodes FreeBSD disklabels if they're at the front of the disk.

[Garrett Cooper <yanegomi%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 8:37 PM, Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost> 
wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 03, 2011 at 01:14:37PM +0000, David Laight wrote:
>> >
>> > But this is potentially very dangerous, in combination with
>> > COMPAT_386BSD_MBRPART, because FreeBSD considers labels to be per-"slice"
>> > (per fdisk-partition) and uses the 0x165 partition type.  So if we are not
>> > very careful, we can hopelessly wreck FreeBSD installations in other
>> > MBR partitions.
>>
>> I'm not advocating (above) writing the NetBSD format label to a
>> type 165 mbr partition.

...

> When I tried to upgrade the FreeBSD systems to the head of the RELENG_8
> branch, they wouldn't boot, because FreeBSD no longer trusts filesystem
> parameters over label geometry.  That was when I booted the old FreeBSD
> kernel and discovered that the NetBSD installer had scribbled all over
> the FreeBSD disklabel.  This is unrecoverable under FreeBSD because FreeBSD
> will not let you shrink a mounted partition, but FreeBSD install discs
> don't have general-purpose tools for fixing this sort of thing.  Very ugly.

<offtopic>

Not official media (yet), but there's an unofficial version coming out
in the next year or so that's in alpha/beta:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/BSDInstall from nwhitehorn@ .

<offtopic>

HTH,
-Garrett