Another fdisk partition for 386/ix.

Mark W. Snitily mark at zok.UUCP
Fri Nov 17 09:49:07 AEST 1989


In article <1989Nov15.175055.913 at esegue.segue.boston.ma.us> johnl at esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine) writes:
>The 386/ix HPDD really expects only to find one Unix partition per disk.
>I expect it wouldn't be too hard to trick fdisk into making another one,
>but I'd be astonished if you could mount it sucessfully.  This isn't really
>ISC's fault, as they inherited the layout scheme from AT&T.

Yes, it can be done.  Zok has a Maxtor 4380E (~320MB) disk.  Originally
I created a 100MB partition for DOS (4.0) and gave the rest to 386/ix.
After installing VP/ix (DOS 3.3), it was obvious that VP/ix couldn't
access the DOS 4.0 partition so I went back and created a 32MB DOS
partition and a spare 68MB partition.  My goal was to use the 68MBs
for news -- which is exactly what I'm using it for.

I forget the details and my notes are sketchy, but here are some
pointers.  [Note: I'm not claiming that this is the "right" way to do
it, but it's worked for me...]

1)  When I split the 100MB partition, I believe that I manually edited
the partition table (using DOS's Norton Utilities) so that the 386/ix
partition was the third entry.  (Don't think this is mandatory, but
it kept things in a logical order.  It does affect the physical partition
device name though.  Since the spare 68MB partition was the 2nd entry
in the table, its device name was /dev/dsk/0p2.  If it was 3rd, it would
have been /dev/dsk/0p3.)

2)  You need to format the partition.  Don't have the exact command
in my notes, think it's simply "format <devicename>".  Believe you can
find an example by looking in the /usr/admin scripts for adding a second
disk.

3)  Make a file system.  [From this point on I kept notes.]  Since I
was going to use it for news, I wanted to use 512 byte blocks.  Couldn't
get it to work, (ended up using 1K blocks).  Believe it created the file
system okay, but couldn't mount it.  Anyone know what the -f name of a
512 byte file system is for the mount command?  Note: I was bitten by
the missing i-node bug in the past, so I specified the max number of
i-nodes (65535).  Here's the exact command I used, obviously your
parameters will differ:

         mkfs /dev/dsk/0p2 140400:65535 1 540 -b 1024

This is what the command printed out:

         Mkfs: /dev/dsk/0p2?
         (DEL if wrong)

         bytes per logical block = 1024
         total logical blocks = 70200
         total inodes = 65488
         gap (physical blocks) = 1
         cylinder size (physical blocks) = 540
         mkfs: Available blocks = 66104

4) At this point you can mount your file system.  Since I wanted my
news to be located in /usr/spool/news, I created that directory and then
did:
         mount -fS51K /dev/dsk/0p2 /usr/spool/news

5) There was some type of complaint (forget what the message was) about
the partition's label.  (Believe the label needs to match the name of
the directory.)  Regardless, this is how I got it to stop complaining.

   First, unmount it with:
         umount /dev/dsk/0p2

   Then label it with:
         labelit /dev/rdsk/0p2 news dpart2

   (The "dpart2" was arbitrary.  The "news" was important.)

6)  All done.  If you want to have it automatically mounted when you boot
add an entry in /etc/fstab.  Here's my fstab:

         /dev/dsk/0s3 /usr
         /dev/dsk/0s4 /usr2
         /dev/dsk/0p1 /dos DOS
         /dev/dsk/0p2 /usr/spool/news

Note: The above fstab worked fine under 2.0.1, but after upgrading to
2.0.2 ISC decided not to allow DOS partitions to be mounted from fstab.
(Asked them about, yes it was intentional, but I still don't understand
their reasoning.)  Had to make a trivial change in my 2.0.2 version of
/etc/mountall to allow DOS entries.

The only item that still has me puzzled is the lost+found directory, it
was not created.  Anyone know how/when this directory is normally created?

Hope this helps...

Mark W. Snitily                 Consulting Services:
894 Brookgrove Lane             Graphics, Operating Systems, Compilers
Cupertino, CA 95014             (408) 252-0456
mark at zok.uucp
...!{amdcad,ardent,athertn,claris,daisy,limbo,mips,sgi,sjsca4,voder}!zok!mark



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