Some people complain that the disklabel program will not write a new
disklabel.  Instead, it complains of some ioctl error.

Doing a Google search on 'disklabel ioctl error', I found Jukka Marin's
complaint (below) and a hint at a solution: try aligning your partitions
on cylinder boundaries.

I suffer from the ioctl error myself. I have not tried to re-align
partitions on cylinder boundaries, but I am going to shortly.  I fear
that I am going to have to scoot around half the partitions on my disk
before I achieve the desired alignment, though.

Dave

On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Jukka Marin wrote:
>Argh.  Now disklabel gives me the error even when total
>disk size is below 2 GB:
>
>disklabel: ioctl DIOCWDINFO: Label magic number or checksum
>  is wrong!
>
>WHAT am I doing wrong??
>
>Six hours labeling one stupid disk.. no ideas left :-(

I've lost a lot of time on this in the past too...To keep labels
compatible with SunOS, partitions offsets and sizes must be on cylinder
boundaries.  I'll bet that's what's going on.

I hope this helps...

			  -Dave McGuire


-- 
David Young                   On the Job Consulting
dyoung@onthejob.net     Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933