Jason Thorpe
>
>On Tue, 24 May 1994 21:53:22 -0700 
> (This is my bacque pas, this is my faux pas) <greywolf@autodesk.com> wrote:
>
> > Could the NetBSD label perhaps be put at a different offset than the SunOS
> > label, and the SunOS label be translated concurrently?  Something to make
> > the DKIOSLABEL stuff work so that things like "newfs" and "disklabel"
> > work...
>
>I can only speak from experience, as I have not taken the time to compare 
>the SunOS disklabel code and the NetBSD/sparc disklabel code...But, I 
>partitioned my two NetBSD drives with SunOS format(8) and NetBSD talked 
>to the drives just fine!

I'll add a recent experience here. A friend of mine was having problems
with an HP SCSI drive hooked to his 3/50. He brought it over so I
could check it out. I first tried hooking it to my netbsd 486 machine.
I was intending to boot the machine into DOS and stick in a floppy with
the scsictl utility program from Roy Neese at Adaptec. After that I
thought I'd see if netbsd would recognize the disk. It didn't. I then
tried reading the disk label, some of the information was garbled, but
apparently the reason it didn't work was because the disk had a zero
length D paratition. Most BSD derived Unix require a C partition that is
the entire disk. Netbsd apparently translates C into being the entire
*unix* portion of the disk and then adds D as the entire disk, including
any DOS, OS/2, etc, partitions out there. I speculated at the time
that if we added a D partition that was the same as the C partition,
netbsd may have recognized the disk, but we didn't try it.

gregc@edi.com


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