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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!newshost.telstra.net!kettle.magna.com.au!metro!news.cs.su.oz.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!news.kei.com!news.mathworks.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!news.u.washington.edu!olsenc From: olsenc@kodiak.ee.washington.edu (Clint Olsen) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Partitiong disks under FreeBSD (ugh) Date: 5 Oct 1995 06:38:20 GMT Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 47 Message-ID: <44vugs$qgc@nntp5.u.washington.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: smokey.ee.washington.edu Hello: Well, the 2.0.5 install went very well. The ftp installation was flawless. I am very impressed with the level of integration and sophistication of the port compilation processes. It even recognizes our AIC 6260! Wheee! My only beef with FreeBSD (and I mean only) vs. Linux is the disk slicing and dicing tools. The sysinstall was very intelligent and capable, but now that we have the system booted, I'm left wondering what the hell is going on. First, messing around with fdisk and disklabel using our previous knowledge of UNIX (Linux/SunOS/HP) proved to be a lost cause. We could never tell it to write the "FreeBSD" label to disk (ioctl(): operation not support by device). Reading the FAQ lead me to something stating I needed an entry in /etc/disktab for things to work properly (wtf?). I have yet to run into a system where I had to know the number of of heads and the RPM of the disk in order to partition and newfs a disk. Another weirdness occurred. I cannot figure out of the driver is properly detecting our disks. The known entry is correct, but what's with the "????"?: aic0 at 0x340-0x35f irq 11 on isa aic0 waiting for scsi devices to settle (aic0:1:0): "CDC 94171-9 0045" type 0 fixed SCSI 1 sd0(aic0:1:0): Direct-Access 312MB (640584 512 byte sectors) (aic0:2:0): "unknown unknown ????" type 0 fixed SCSI 0 sd1(aic0:2:0): Direct-Access 312MB (640500 512 byte sectors) If I had known that this was going to be so painful, I would have fdisk'd the damn things under Linux and labelled them as FreeBSD partitions before I blew the OS away. I am still not sure if this is a driver or a hardware problem. These are pretty old and messed up disks, but a few months ago, Linux was able to identify the devices. Perhaps you might know whether or not this has something to do with the fact that we cannot label the disks... At any rate, you guys did one hell of a job! It was nice to get rid of Linux. -Clint