On Fri, 12 Jan 1996, Markus Illenseer Markus wrote:

>  Ok, here is my error again: All i did was inserting a fresh, new and virgin 
> hard drive (SCSI) into my sytem, already running NetBSD on another drive.
> 
>  Booting and starting disklabel -e sd1 was what I did then. Creating partitions
> and then saving resulted into sort of error, but the disklabel was "written".
> 
>  All options for disklabel resulted into this error:
> 
> disklabel: warning, DOS partition table with no valid NetBSD partition
> disklabel: no disk label                                              
> 
>  Nontheless, the label was written and usuable - until next boot, where
> everything vanished. I was able to "resurect" the drive, because I luckily
> wrote the output of disklabel to a file and using this reanimated the
> drives.

Ah, you're using the -e option. Take a look at the -r option and note
carefully what it does. It looks to me as if when you use -e and not -r,
the label in memory is changed, but not the one on disk. Of course, if
you use -e and -r together, you'll be editing bogus data, rather than
the fake label created for the disk with no label.

I generally do the following with a new disk sd1:

	disklabel sd1 >protfile
	vi protfile
	[ make appropriate changes and write it out ]
	disklabel -r -R sd1 protfile

I really, really recommend keeping a copy of every disklabel you
ever make in an appropriately named file in /etc/disklabels or
wherever on some machine anyway. It gives you a better starting
point when you have to go at another disk of the same type, and it
gives you an easy backup should a disk get wiped and you have to
restore from a full backup.

cjs

Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
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