> Make sure that your partitions start and end on cylinder boundary.
> The sparc firmware won't work properly if this is not the case

It's not quite that simple.

The firmware demands a Sun-compatible disk label.

Sun-compatible disk labels store partition start points as cylinder
numbers.  They simply have no way to represent a partition that doesn't
begin on a cylinder boundary.  ("Cylinder" refers not to actual
cylinders on the disk but rather to cylinders of sizes defined by the
sec/trk and trk/cyl values in the label.  These values do not
necessarily have to bear any relationship to any actual disk geometry.
It is tempting to set them both to 1 and thereby get partitions
beginning on arbitrary boundaries, but as I recall when I contemplated
that I found that there was some number that was only 16 bits wide that
defeated that.  It isn't the starting cylinder number, which is 32
bits; the total cylinder count for the disk is only 16 bits wide, but I
don't know whether anything cares if that number is a lie.  Except
SunOS, which I know blabs noisily on boot in some circumstances.)

They do store the size as a block count; the partition doesn't have to
end on a cylinder boundary.  Nor, as far as I can tell, does any Sun
firmware impose any such requirement.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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