On Fri, Feb 12, 1999 at 12:16:43PM +0200, Andreas Gustafsson wrote:
> Jukka Marin wrote:
> > /dev/rwd0a:   132048 sectors in 131 cylinders of 16 tracks, 63 sectors
> >     64.5 MB in 9 cyl groups (16 c/g, 7.88MB/g, 1792 i/g)
> >     super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:write error: 64
> > wtfs: Read-only filesystem
> 
> It looks like you are trying to overwrite the disklabel.  This causes
> a "Read-only filesystem" error because the wd driver will not let you
> write the sector containing the disklabel unless you do a special
> ioctl first.
> 
> This happens if you create an "a" partition starting at track 0
> instead of track 1.  Unfortunately, the design of sysinst makes this
> mistake all too easy to make.
> 
> Sysinst does reserve the first track of the disk by default, but if
> you choose to have partition sizes displayed in cylinders or megabytes
> rather than in sectors, the starting point of the "a" partition will
> be displayed rounded down to the nearest full cylinder or megabyte -
> that is, as zero.  Then if you want to change the size of the "a"
> partition manually, there is no way of reserving the first track!

That was it.  I specified the sizes in sectors and newfs went OK.

After this, it would be nice if I could just leave sysinst and untar
my own tarballs - in this case, I didn't want a standard installation,
but to copy the system verbatim from another machine (upgrading hardware
and not willing to start from scratch).

Thanks a lot for the hint!

  -jm