On Sat, 25 May 1996, Michael J. Way wrote:

> [...]
> 
> Does this mean that partition sizes are limited in size? I must also mention
> this, I had the same kind of error with my XT4380E disk (380Mb) where I 
> have the NetBSD OS running from. I had a partition with a size of 482000
> and here is what I got with newfs,
> # newfs /dev/rra4f
> write error: 481999
> wfts: Invalid arguement
> 
> So, thinking that partition sizes were limited I went ahead and lowered the
> size to 200000 Blocks and created another with the left-overs.
> Then newfs worked on the smaller partition. BUT, not on the larger left-over,
> which is 282000 blocks in the partition table,
> # newfs /dev/rra4g
> write error 281999
> wtfs: Invalid arguement
> 
> Please tell me this is something trivial I just didn't pick up in one of the
> FAQs....

> 	thanks to anyone who has any idea of what is going on here.

	Partitions can certainly be many GB is size (unless the vax port
	has some oddity here, which I doubt), so thats unlikely to be the
	problem.

	Is it possible the disklabel is incorrect about the number of
	blocks on the disk?

	Try creating a small partition (a few thousand blocks) that sits
	right at the end of the disk (which should fail), then moving its
	offset down until you find the furthest that will work, and then
	calculate a new value for the c partition.
	Best to move in large chunks at first then finer. (Binary search
	anyone :)

	(You could do all this by just shrinking the c partition in stages
	but there may be some performance gains to be made by just using a
	small partition :)

                   David/abs             (david@mono.org)

 System Manager, Southern Studios, Box 59, London N22 1AR.  +44 181 888 8949 

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