On Thu, 9 Jan 1997, der Mouse wrote:

> > yesterday I tried to use my ZIP drive ( SCSI of course ) to bring the
> > NetBSD-1.2 dist. home to my hp.  I thought about disklabeling it on
> > the hp and then later at the university use it on a SPARC IPX running
> > netbsd 1.1.  first thing: the sparc didn't see the disklabel.
> 
> Yeah, NetBSD/sparc - at least last time I looked at the code - doesn't
> understand native NetBSD disklabels, only SunOS-style disklabels.  IMO
> this is a lose (you need a SunOS-style label on your boot disk, but not
> on any others, unless they're shared with non-NetBSD OSes).

NetBSD/sparc does recognise native NetBSD disklabels AFAIK. The
problem here is that disklabels are *not* MI. The hp300 port puts
them in a different place (beginning of block 2) than the sparc
port (128 bytes into sector 0).

> > or how to make a filesystem on it that both, the hp and the sparc can
> > read ?
> 
> This is probably possible, but it would be a bit ugly.
> [explanation deleted]

Easier I think would be just to disklabel the disk on the HP300
(leaving an extra blank cylinder or two at the beginning, as der
Mouse mentioned), put the filesystem and what not on it, and keep
a copy of the ASCII version of that disklabel (the output of
`disklabel -r'). Then put the disk on your sparc, and disklabel it
again with that same ASCII disklabel (using `disklabel -r -R').
Now your disk should have both disklabels on it, both identical,
and the rest might Just Work. (No guarantees, though.)

I think there is someone out there working on an MI disklabel
format, but I can't reacall who, nor do I know the status of that
project.

cjs

Curt Sampson    cjs@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
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