Re: Fdisk/disklabel issue with install

[Kenneth R Westerback <kwesterback@home.com>]

I am sure there is a better way to solve your problem, but something 
that worked for me in the past was to zero out the disklabel block 
on the partition with

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rwd0c bs=512 count=1 seek=64

Remember to change rwd0c to the correct disk! 

I haven't tested this in quite a while, so caution is indicated. The
other possible glitch being, I don't remember if dd is on the boot 
floppy, so unless you have a working system that can access the disk ... 

.... Ken

On Fri, Dec 01, 2000 at 08:47:06PM -0600, David Kanter wrote:
> I deleted an older OpenBSD partition to make way for a fresh, new 2.8 
> install of a different partition size (no big deal). The problem is that 
> something (disklabel?) refuses to recognize the new, smaller size of the 
> partition set with fdisk. It wants to use to older, erased, size.
> 
> After running fdisk with the install disk and writing the new partition 
> size, I came into disklabel which had the older disklabels already "known" 
> (and their old sizes). Although fdisk had the last OpenBSD sector at about 
> 10 million, disklabel (in its introductory message) wanted to use up 
> through 12 million (the older size). So I used the "b" disklabel option and 
> reset the size, which seemed to work, until I finished running 
> disklabel...and noticed that it still used the older size, even though 
> fdisk had a partition that was 2 million sectors smaller?
> 
> Is there a way to erase the section of the disk that holds the disklabel 
> info? On a fresh disk, writing with fdisk brings up a blue-highlighted 
> message stating "No disklabel exists." But now that I once had OpenBSD on 
> this disk, I get not such message after saving fdisk. How can I get to that 
> virginal state?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
>