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What do you do with the "Whole disk" partition?
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johnnynieh
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 9:04 am    Post subject: What do you do with the "Whole disk" partition? Reply with quote

-- Gentoo on Sparc --
As subject, do I need to do "mke2fs -j /dev/hda3" or "mkreiserfs /dev/hda3"? mount root on it or not? and is it supposed to be listed in /etc/fstab?
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at6
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 10:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

first of all:

hi johnnynieh,

i don't get it what you really mean. you're asking if you have to do these steps while you're installing gentoo?

of course! where would you otherwise store you data? on floppys? no!
all three steps are necessary to have a fully functional gentoo system. without the "-j" param mke2fs builds an ext2 fs for example.

hint: there is a very good tutorial about installing gentoo ;)

regards,
marc
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johnnynieh
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 12:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

at6 wrote:

i don't get it what you really mean. you're asking if you have to do these steps while you're installing gentoo?

Yes, but I meant only on that particular partition marked as "Whole Disk".
Probably I didn't make myself clear enough, I'm sorry.
says I have only 1 hdd, /dev/hda
I partitioned it into /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, /dev/hda3, /dev/hda4,
while installing on SPARC, it's required that there is a partition "whole disk", as in the handbook (/dev/hda3 for example.), but all of the hda1, hda2, hda4...etc are on the same drive, just different partition so I can make different file system on each partition, correct?
if hda3 is the "whole disk", does it mean that if I did mke2fs /dev/hda3, it will overwrite what I have done, says mkreiserfs /dev/hda4, since hda4 is *part of* the "whole disk"???


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Ferris
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 2:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Please do nothing with the whole disk partition (/dev/hda3, /dev/sdb3, etc.)

If you actually manage to put a file system there, it will wipe out anything on all your
other partitions, because it is the entire disk.

Do not try to mount it, bacause it is not a file system. and if you write to it,
you will be writing to your other partition(s), to.

You can read it (as /dev/hda3 for example), but you almost never want to.

It should not be listed in fstab.

It's there because sun labels have it there; I don't recall why, if I ever knew.
When you label your disk and see it there, that's a good thing. But you
needn't and shouldn't do anything with it.

Example:
Here is a /jaz drive (with a little space wasted)---
Code:

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdc (Sun disk label): 62 heads, 62 sectors, 1016 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 3844 * 512 bytes

   Device Flag    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1             0      1016   1952752   83  Linux native
/dev/sdc3             0      1016   1952752    5  Whole disk


The file system is on /dev/sdc1, and /dev/sdc3 is there as part of the sun
label. You will notice that they are both the "whole disk," so that if I
actually built a file system on /dev/sdc3, there would be an empty file
system (or garbage) on both partitions.

Sorry to go on so long, but you really don't want to mess with the whole
disk partitions.

Regards,
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johnnynieh
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 26, 2004 4:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thank you, Ferris
your explanation is very clear, I won't touch the partition marked as "whole disk" then.

If that's the case, I think the Gentoo handbook should clarify this for SPARC users, since in the handbook, it follows the x86 arch. and use /dev/hda3 as the root partition, but in SPARC section, /dev/hda3 happened to be the "whole disk" partition, if users follow the instruction, after partition the hdd, users would tend to do mke2fs -j /dev/hda3 (I did that once), which is incorrect for Sun Dish Label.

Anyway, thank you for your reply. :O)
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linuxbum
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 30, 2004 4:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Johnnynieh

I was wondering if they would get to generic in the install now that they obsoleted the SPAC install document :cry: :cry: :cry:

Keep checking the SPARC forum we will see if we can get the SPARC doc at least available for reference.
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ciaranm
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 30, 2004 5:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Since Swift doesn't want to fix the handbook, I wrote this. Comments, requests for updates and so on welcome ([url=mailto:ciaranm@gentoo.org]email[/url] is best...)
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Sven Vermeulen
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 01, 2004 9:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Doesn't want to fix? I've separated and fixed (as you so kindly say it) the handbook sunday, drafts are available on http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/draft/handbook-sparc.xml?part=1 and most architectures will have these instructions official before the end of the week. Only sparc will lag a bit behind because I am waiting for better fdisk instructions you promised me :p
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