Subject: Re: Strange disklabel/fidsk info?
To: Matthew Mondor <mmondor@linuxguru.net>
From: Richard Rauch <rauch@eecs.ukans.edu>
List: port-i386
Date: 12/23/2000 10:05:52
> On Fri, Dec 22, 2000 at 11:35:13PM -0600, Richard Rauch wrote:
> > 
> >   "I probably don't know what I'm talking about." --rauch@eecs.ukans.edu
> >
> 
> Hi there, I wonder if it really is you, do you remember meeting me on
> fidonet C echo like ten years ago or so? If it's you, happy to see you
> around (-:

I was there, and 10 years sounds about right.  I can't say that the name
rings a bell.

(Not that this is exactly on-topic, or helps much with my present
concerns.  (^&)


A little more on-topic:

Since I'd completed a full system backup prior to encountering the
above-mentioned strangeness with fdisk & disklabel, I finally went ahead
and just tried assuming that the BIOS partition wasn't all that
important.  I gave a 4GB (actually 8,000,000 sector) partition over to
GNU/LINUX, and the rest to NetBSD.  Of course, such a round number didn't
come out evenly to a cylinder boundary.  Hopefully, that's not going to
cause me any grief...

Aside from some griping from the LINUX installation about one of my
partitions going past the ``end'' of the disk, all is fairly well.  I may
have to re-do the LINUX install (and even repartition the LINUX
segment)---I didn't know that LINUX used a BIOS-level partition for
swap-space.

A final, relavent question: As implied above, I'm not sure if I should
have taken pains to get the BIOS partitions to end on cylinder boundaries.  
The system boots okay, so BIOS is able to figure things out.  But am I in
any danger of GNU/LINUX overrunning its filesystem and trashing my NetBSD
filesystem?  Or am I relatively safe?  I tend to assume that the only
thing that should care is the boot-selection code, and since
fdisk(8) didn't adjust my numbers to a cylinder boundary, it should be
safe.  Yes?


(Horrors, I just had a thought.  People were talking about ~30GB disks
having a jumper setting to mark them as smaller disks, for the sake of
certain systems.  It's not possible, is it, that my drive (a mere 20GB;
(^&) has such a jumper setting enabled?  NetBSD was pretty sure that it
knew I had a ~7GB drive.  On the othre hand, I don't remember having to do
any special coaxing to get it to recognize the drive as a 20GB drive last
August when I first put NetBSD on it.)


  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about." --rauch@eecs.ukans.edu