Thanks to everyone who responded, and to those yet to come...
This list is truly a blessing, relieving many a headache :)
Original question:
> Could anyone out there help me understand raw disk partitions or point me to a
> source for info? We have a situation where we want to use raw partitions for
> Sybase. When the system is booted, (Sun runninng 4.1.3) we get the message
>
> BAD MAGIC NUMBER
>
> for the sd3a partition, which is our "raw" partition.
Summary:
Answers pointed me to 3 specific issues.
1. Make sure the sd0a partition is removed from /etc/fstab
if you are trying to access it as a raw partition
2. Do not do newfs on a raw partition.
3. You cannot use cylinder 0 as the start cylinder of a raw partition,
as cylinder 0 contains the disk label and partition info. To
quote Richard Sands of Computervision, " Most uses of partitions on Suns (file system & swap) understand that this cylinder is
special & will leave it alone, even though you have assigned
it to their use. Sybase doesn't though, & will quite happily
overwrite the disk label as soon as it's fired up." So you
must define the partition to start at 1, instead of 0.
Thanks again guys!
Cindy
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:10:26 CDT