Sun disk labels
Last night I wrote:
> Unfortunately, I still can't boot from sd@0,0. Here's what I get on
> the screen, in case it helps:
>
> Rebooting with command: disk3
> Boot device: /sbus/esp@0,800000/sd@0,0 File and args:
> Bad magic number in disk label
> Can't open disk label package
> Can't open boot device
> Type help for more information
> ok
Just before going to bed I printed out the partition table with fdisk,
dd-ed /dev/zero onto the first partition of /dev/sda, then ran fdisk
again: this seemed to make fdisk realise that it ought to create a Sun
disk label. Then I recreated my original partition table by hand.
The PROM doesn't object to the lack of disk label any more. However, I
can't mount any of my partitions.
Apparently Sun-disk-labelled partition tables work differently from
whatever kind of partition table I had before. (I think the disc was
previously used by old SCO Unix on x86; cfdisk seemed to think that one
of the partitions was labelled for "GNU HURD", which was funny.)
If my experience of Sun is anything to go by, Sun call the first sector
"3" instead of 0 or 1 ... :-)
This should be in the installation instructions somewhere.
In the meantime, does anyone know if there is a simple relationship
between the values displayed by fdisk for a Sun-disk-labelled partition
table and the values displayed by fdisk for other kinds of partition
table. (And how many kinds of incompatible partition table are there?)
Edmund
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