Re: help with disklabel

[Patrick Welche <prlw1%cam.ac.uk@localhost>]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 10:03:16PM +0000, Jonathan A. Kollasch wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 01:05:31PM -0600, Brook Milligan wrote:
> > I am trying to set up the disklabel on some disks that will be RAID
> > components.  Despite having created many disklabels, I'm running into
> > an issue I don't understand.  Here are some of the commands:
> > 
> >      # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd4d count=8192 bs=512
> >      8192+0 records in
> >      8192+0 records out
> >      4194304 bytes transferred in 0.654 secs (6413308 bytes/sec)
> >      # disklabel -R sd4 label      # see below for the disklabel 'label'
> >      disklabel: no space in bootarea (sector 0) to create label
> > 
> > My intent was to remove all old labels, etc. with dd and then add a
> > new label.  I have never seen the 'bootarea too small' message before.
> > 
> > Any help on how to label this drive is greatly appreciated.
> 
> The disklabel mentioned a drive of 1169920000 512-byte sectors
> (or about 600 marketing GB), is that what dmesg reports too?
> 
> Or, the real question, is the drive over 2^31 sectors?
> 
> If it is, you won't be able to use disklabel.  You'll need to
> look at dk(4) and related tools.

That surprises me:

NetBSD 5.99.36/i386
wd0: 931 GB, 1938021 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 1953525168 sectors
wd1: 931 GB, 1938021 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 1953525168 sectors
# disklabel -rt wd0
raid|Automatically generated label:\
        :dt=ESDI:se#512:ns#63:nt#16:sc#1008:nc#1938021:\
        :pa#20971440:oa#4195296:ta=RAID:\
        :pb#4195233:ob#63:tb=swap:\
        :pc#1953525105:oc#63:\
        :pd#1953525168:od#0:\
        :pe#125829648:oe#25166736:te=RAID:\
        :pf#629146224:of#150996384:tf=RAID:\
        :pg#1173382560:og#780142608:tg=RAID:

What does your "label" look like?
(Guessing: maybe start your first partition at 63 rather than 0?)

Cheers,

Patrick