Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!sdd.hp.com!think.com!yale!cmcl2!lanl!bedney@monolith.lanl.gov
From: bedney@monolith.lanl.gov (William J. Edney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: 2.1 BuildDisk
Keywords: BuildDisk, disk
Message-ID: <25377@lanl.gov>
Date: 10 Jun 91 16:43:56 GMT
Sender: news@lanl.gov
Lines: 27

To All -
I went to reformat my hard drive this weekend and this is what happened:

I have an Imprimis Wren VII 1 GB hard drive (which is not supported by NeXT) at  
home. I wanted to split the drive into two partitions because I've had to  
rebuild hard drives for people who only have stations and I want to do this by  
setting up a "mini-network" (i.e. boot their machines off of mine). Under 2.0,  
a person with a hard drive not supported by NeXT and wanting to split that hard  
drive into two partitions had to write their own disktab, which I did  
grudgingly. I knew at the time that I did not optimize my hard disk for all of  
its storage, but I was in a hurry and didn't want to have to play around with  
adding and subtracting bytes from one partition to another. Then, I got 2.1. I  
"updated" the 2.0 optical to 2.1 and went to do another BuildDisk on my hard  
drive. This time when I said I wanted two partitions BuildDisk came up with a  
little dialog box with a slider in it. As I moved the slider, it subtracted  
bytes from one partition and added them to the other. What a great idea. If  
your SCSI drive supports the MODE_SENSE command, you don't need those disktabs  
any more (unless you want 3 or more partitions)!!
Thanks NeXT for making my life easier once again (or as a colleague of mine  
remarked "Wow, they're really trying to make Unix livable!!"

--
- Bill Edney
- Los Alamos National Laboratory

"I don't speak for my employer and they don't speak for me. Kind of a nice  
arrangement."