Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!PT.CS.CMU.EDU!sei!sei.cmu.edu!pdb
From: pdb@sei.cmu.edu (Patrick Barron)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Ultrix == Unix
Message-ID: <4658@aw.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 18 Mar 88 17:25:51 GMT
References: <8803112014.AA05869@decwrl.dec.com> <883@unmvax.unm.edu> <3464@cbmvax.UUCP> <5533@swan.ulowell.edu>
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Reply-To: pdb@sei.cmu.edu (Pat Barron)
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, SEI, Pgh, Pa
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In article <5533@swan.ulowell.edu> page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) writes:
>Are on-disk partition tables that important?  How often do you
>change your partitions?

On-disk partition tables are VERY important for us, since we have a
whole lot of third-party MSCP disks with different sizes.  Without
being able to change the partition tables, we'd have to have a different
version of the kernel (with the partition tables hacked up in uda.c
the right way) for each hardware configuration.  And if you have a
machine with disks from any two different vendors at the same time,
well, you lose, since the device driver can only store one partition
table at a time in the device driver for each different kind of disk.
(Yes, I know that the *real* bug is that our Maxtor disks and our Fujitsu
disks both identify themselves as RA80's...)   And, of course, if you're
a binary-only site, you lose again, since you couldn't fix it even if
you knew how.

--Pat.