Subject: Re: Where is the disklabel stored?
To: Johan Ihren <johani@pdc.kth.se>
From: Patrick Welche <prlw1@newn.cam.ac.uk>
List: port-i386
Date: 02/11/2000 12:22:50
Johan Ihrén wrote:
>
I am not sure about these answers, but my impression is:

> 1. Is this correct? I.e. that the disklabel doesn't lie in the
>    beginning of the NetBSD-part of the disk but rather in track 0.

I believe the disklabel is at the beginning of the NetBSD-part of the disk.

> 2. Will the bootselector and disklabel be able to coexist or may the
>    bootselector extend into the next block if needed (and hence
>    overwrite the disklabel)?

If the bootselector is "Which partition would like to boot from?", then that
will be at the beginning of the disk, and you want your NetBSD partition to
start say with an offset of 1 track from the beginning to give it room --
obviously depends on the "bootselector".

> 3. Does anyone ever do this, i.e. write a NetBSD disklabel onto a
>    non-NetBSD disk, or is it a BAD IDEA? I.e. "ought to work" is not
>    as good as "I do this regularly"...

I don't. Say wd0 is a non-NetBSD disk, and wd1 is a NetBSD disk, doing

disklabel wd0

should show you which identifier (eg wd0e) NetBSD automatically associates with
each partition. Given a fixed number of disks etc, that identifier won't
change, so it is safe to put something like

/dev/wd0e /dos msdos rw,noauto 0 0

in /etc/fstab. I don't see what you would gain by putting a real disklabel
on the disk (someone else please correct me!)
 
> 4. Track 1 and on (i.e. sector 63 and onwards) is WindozeLand. Is
>    there any forseeable risk of disklabel(8) going astray and messing
>    that up even a little?

Pass - I would expect the disklabel to end up inside the NetBSD partition,
but as there isn't one, I wouldn't put a disklabel on..

Cheers,

Patrick