Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!uw-entropy!dataio!pilchuck!ssc!markz
From: markz@ssc.UUCP (Mark Zenier)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.microport
Subject: Re: YA up 2.4 (warning on labelit )
Keywords: second disk
Message-ID: <1593@ssc.UUCP>
Date: 16 Dec 88 21:41:31 GMT
References: <1583@ssc.UUCP> <590@micropen>
Organization: SSC, Inc., Seattle, WA
Lines: 26

In article <590@micropen>, dave@micropen (David F. Carlson) writes:
> I have never damaged a properly made disk with labelit.  Run labelit only
> on the raw disk (/dev/rdsk/...) and never on the block device.  Never run
> labelit on a mounted partition.  Good luck.

After I recovered the rest of my boot partition, and experimented some
more, I found two reasons for only running disk partitioning from
a floppy resident microport (286).

1. It's a lot faster.  After you run fdisk or divvy off the floppy and it
needs to reinitialize the hard disk driver, it just sets some sort of flag
and the driver reinitializes itself at the next disk operation.  When 
you're booted off the hard drive, it reboots the whole mess.

2. Labelit is carnivorous, and misdocumented.  If it decides to chew on
the root file system, It can't do any damage to a write protected floppy.

Some further notes on setting up partitions on the second drive.

1.	Making fdisk determine the bad tracks would be a good idea :-)

2.	After the partition is mounted.  go (cd) to the partitions root
 	directory and run the /etc/mklost+found script.

Mark Zenier    uunet!nwnexus!pilchuck!ssc!markz    markz@ssc.uucp
                      uw-beaver!tikal!