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From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Location of partition table on disk
Message-ID: <1173@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Thu, 2-Oct-86 19:17:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1173
Posted: Thu Oct  2 19:17:38 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Oct-86 06:47:34 EDT
References: <7473@sun.uucp> <15583@mordor.ARPA>
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 17

In article <15583@mordor.ARPA>, jdb@mordor.ARPA (John Bruner) writes:
> Sun's partition table on the disc is very convenient.  Unfortunately,
> their placement of it is not.  They put the disc label in the first
> sector on the volume.  This is OK if your machine's ROM knows about it,
> but if the hardware bootstrap wants to read block 0 (as the VAX does)
> it is a little inconvenient. :-)

This should be solvable by putting the partition table in the END
of block 0.  Presumably a short piece of code at the FRONT of block 0
can read in a few other blocks and jump to them.

Note that during bootstrap, you may not know how to find block N
(N > 1) since you won't know how many heads, sectors/track, etc exist.
That information is also in the Sun partition table.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
		     May the Source be with you!