On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 12:56:21AM +0100, Chris Newport wrote: > 2) Older OBPs cannot see beyond either 1Gb or 2Gb into a partition > depending on version. If your installer puts anything needed for > the initial boot process beyond this point you will not be able > to boot. [ Affects Sparc32 ]
I've got a sun4u, so this shouldn't affect me... > 3) The first cylinder of the disk contains the partition information. > Most filesystems work around this by not actually using the first > cylinder, but Linux Raid does not understand this and it will > overwrite the tables. The solution is simple - just create a small > partition of one cylinder at cylinder zero and do not use it. > [ Affects Linux Raid and possibly oddball filesystems such as XFS > only when they start at cylinder zero ] I can't quite reproduce this - my current /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1, both of which start at the first cylinder, are in a RAID array, but work fine. > 4) If the partition table on the disk was first written by an old > version of the Solaris format command the maximum useable size of > any partition will be either 1Gb or 2Gb depending on version. > Linux will probably not notice and allow you to create a larger > partition which will confuse the OBP even if the OBP does not have > the limitation in 2) above. > The workaround for this is to destroy cylinder zero by filling it > with zeros using dd and then use Linux fdisk to create a new BSD > table. [ Affects disks initially formatted with old utilities ] I had Solaris on it previously, but I only had Linux parted and fdisk trample over it several times, I never filled it with zeros. Is that really necessary? :) -- 2. That which causes joy or happiness. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]