On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 12:53:39PM -0000, David Lord wrote:
> On 27 Nov 2006, at 12:54, Henry Nelson wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 26, 2006 at 09:21:04PM +0000, David Laight wrote:
> > > I suspect that you haven't set the partition type to 169 in fdisk.
> > 
> > How is this done?

It would be nice to get a "cookbook recipe" for this.  (Preferably from
as many people as possible.  It's not as if it's irresponsible to reveal
a dangerous command or anything to the clueless. :) --  I just got through
the 8 or so variations of "howto zero out a disk" that I have in my notes,
many from rather well-known NetBSD gurus.  It became clear that the bs
field is somewhat of preference, and that there is no "best" way, _but
there is a "right" way_.  It would be nice to have the same guide for
fdisk, too.  Otherwise, I will spend another some weeks going through all
the possible permeations.  TIA)

> > I've read the manual for fdisk over and over and cannot see what option
> > is used to set the "partition type".  What other types of partitions are
> > there besides 169?
> 
> 'fdisk -l' gives list of possible types

Thanks for confirming that.  I wasn't 100% sure that "sysid" meant
"partition type".

> Try 'fdisk -u wd0' which should take you through interactive mode, one of

This is where my troubles have begun, I would like to run fdisk on the
command line NON-interactively (use the -f option).

So far I have one example on how to do this: "/sbin/fdisk -v -v -f -u -0
 -s 169/63/2001825 wd1".  Somehow I managed to botch this, but I hope to
re-try Saturday night.  (Although I still don't understand why two "-v"s
would be necessary  --  the reason for wanting multiple real-life examples.)

> I've just had a nightmare upgrade of notebook from 30G to 80G hdd and 

If you happen to have digitalized (not on scraps of paper like me)
notes on this upgrade process that you can make public, they would be
nice to have (on or off list, or web page).

> type 169 (netbsd) as type 6 (dos) and after fsck proudly announced it 
> has corrected the errors it found :-(.

If you have cataracts, a lot of times you miss these "proud announcements".
(Also one reason for shying away from interactive mode.)

> partition that holds the Acronis backup of XP and dumps of NetBSD 
> system. Currently NetBSD-4-beta is installed to see what extra 
> hardware is usable but original has lots of packages installed and 
> working nicely.

Thanks for sharing this.  It really broadens the horizons for me.

-- 
henry nelson
  WWW_HOME=http://yuba(dot)ne(dot)jp/(tilde)home/