On Thursday, January 16, 2003, at 04:14 AM, Jaromir Dolecek wrote:

>> Perhaps related to this is that every time I boot my machine, I
>> get a couple of messages late in the process:
>>
>>      raidctl: unable to open device file: raid0
>>      raidctl: unable to open device file: raid1
>
> You SHOULD NOT use 'c' or 'd' parts of the disk. 'c' is reserved
> for 'NetBSD part of the disk' and 'd' for 'whole disk' (on i386).
> Create a separate disk part, can use one of a,b,e-p for this.

Sorry to jump in so late in the thread.

To be clear, those are i386-port restrictions. On your sparc, you'll 
only want to avoid partition 'c'.

I used to use partition 'c', too, to mean unambiguously that this 
partition covers the whole disk. However, that got in the way of 
commands like 'disklabel sdN' and 'raidctl -whatever raidM'. Everything 
generally still worked, as you've discovered, but it was annoying, and 
clearly not the intent of the designers of the tools. I now use 
partition 'a' for the whole-disk use, configuring only 'a' and 'c' at 
all, making it very easy to see that 'a' has the same start cylinder 
and size as 'c'.

- Geoff