Subject: Re: Adding Disk Drives to NetBSD
To: Philip Tait <Philip.Tait@phxase.allied.com>
From: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU>
List: port-pmax
Date: 06/26/1998 13:45:17
>> Shocks! I cannot believe that there is no utility to format
>> and partition a drive.
>>
>> Are there any future plans for this?

>This does seem to be a remaining area where NetBSD/pmax is inferior to Ultrix,
>which did not require disktab entries after 4.2, (1991?), IIRC.  It would be
>nice to have an equivalent utility to rzdisk or scu, at least for formatting.
>Has there been any work in these areas?
> Shocks! I cannot believe that there is no utility to format
> and partition a drive.
>
> Are there any future plans for this?

I don't know about about lowlevel SCSI format.

But for labelling (partitioning) disks: you don't need a disktab
entry: disklabel -e works pretty nicely if you want a no-holds-barred
approach.  If hte disk is unlabelled, the kernel will fake up a label
that gets teh geometry and total sectors from the drive, and lets you
edit the partition info.

If you want a menu-driven interface that does most of the work for
you, then you can use sysinst. It gets the geometry info from the
kernel the same way that sysinst does, and it's much more forgiving
than disklabel -e.

The UI isnt packaged very nicely for use on an already-installed
system -- you have to say you want to do an install and point it at
the newly-installed disk, and then quit after writing the label -- but
it does work.

Somebody please send a PR asking to make sysinst's disk-partition
functionality available for newly-installed disks.  It should happen
for 1.4.