>> Hi

(Hi Chris! :-)

>> Are disklabels endian related?  I find that i cannot move a
>> disklabelled scsi drive from my i386 to my alpha, nor to a sparc.

If the problem were endianness, it would work fine between i386 and
alpha - they're both little-endian.

Disklabels are inherently machine-dependent.  There has been talk of
making all ports understand all disklabels, by moving the disklabel
code into the MI part of the kernel and collecting all the various
forms of disklabels together.

Does your disk have an MBR (ie, fdisk-style) partition table on it?
I'm not sure any but the i386 port will understand it if so.

>> If so, is there something i should be doing differently to move
>> large amounts of information from one machine to another (or doing
>> upgrades?)

> Do you have a network interface where you can copy stuff that way?
> If not, can you use tar(1) to write directly to the drive and then
> untar it?  [pretend a disk partition is a tape drive]

This ought to work...but as the person who wrote it implied, make sure
that either you don't overwrite the label area of the drive (pick a
partition that doesn't overlap it) or you don't care about the label
area (use a disk with nothing precious at all on it).  Since your whole
problem is label interpretation, for what you want, you'll kinda have
to go the second route.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
		     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B