Re: Keeping NetBSD disklabel up to date

[mlelstv%serpens.de@localhost (Michael van Elst)]

beaker%sdf.org@localhost (beaker) writes:

>Is it safe and sufficient to run 'mbrlabel -fw <device>' on NetBSD
>whenever there has been partition resizing (usually via Gpartd)
>such that the disklabel no longer reflects the current partitioning
>state?

mbrlabel creates disklabel entries for MBR partition entries, nothing
generic. It also won't move any data.


>System in question is an old 32bit i386 with an MBR partition scheme
>on a SATA disc hosting several Linux partitions and one NetBSD FFS2
>partition.  Bootloader is GAG, not GRUB nor native NetBSD bootloader.

If you only change the Linux partitions, you can use mbrlabel
(without -w) to print the necessary disklabel entries. mbrlabel
doesn't know how to delete or modify existing entries, so you need
to do that and use the mbrlabel output as a template.

If you want to modify or even resize the NetBSD partitions, it gets
much more complicated. A save approach is to boot from an alternate
installation (Live- or Installation-CD), backup the partitions,
modify them accordingly and restore the partition content from
the backup. You may also have to reinstall the bootloader.