I am attempting to partition a 32gb drive for OS4.2. What is the best way to partition this? Do I just partiton using dos style partitions in 4gb increments? I am seeing conflicting information on this. Thanks in advance.
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Brian
Quote from: "barcher174"I am attempting to partition a 32gb drive for OS4.2. What is the best way to partition this? Do I just partiton using dos style partitions in 4gb increments? I am seeing conflicting information on this. Thanks in advance.
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Brian
The process is a bit convoluted if you want the drive partitioned "just right".
The best way to do it is from a running NS or OS system that has /etc/disktab in place that contains an entry specific to the large drive. Without a running system it's probably best to create a "clean" install on a separate drive first, then boot from that drive, edit /etc/disktab and init the final 32gb drive. I ended-up creating four master image drives that way with NS and OS for m68k and i386 architectures. They all have patches, drivers and disktab entries appropriate to the configuration.
For OS I would recommend one 2gb system boot partition followed by up to seven 4gb partitions. This will allow you to use dump/restore for cloning or backup of the boot partition, since restore on OS fails with partitions larger than 2gb. The remaining 4gb partitions can be backed up with tar, etc. Note that on NS all partitions must be no larger than 2gb.
Once partitioned, you can dump/restore your master drive image onto the first partition of the new drive and it will be ready to boot from.
The detailed information for all the above is scattered in various forum posts. If you need it I can collect some links for you.
Thank you t-rexky. I have followed your advice and it seems to be working now. The disktab configuration was definitely non-intuitive and google was little help, but a days worth of trial and error got me on my way.
You are welcome. Creation of the disk tab entry is a bit cumbersome, but once you create one for a similar size drive and partition configuration you can reuse it. There is a NeXTanswers document #1533 on partitioning large drives and also a collection of disktab entries floating on the net. Have a look at the following:
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=9996http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1332http://www.deadstart.net/NeXT/disktab/I am by no means an expert on creating disktabs, but I created a number of them for the various disks I have around here. One part specifically that I am not completely comfortable with is the optimization of the following parameters:
# b[a-h] partition block sizes in bytes
# f[a-h] partition fragment sizes in bytes
# c[a-h] partition cylinders-per-group
# d[a-h] partition density (bytes-per-inode)
Sun (now Oracle) have pretty good general reference on the UFS parameters that would be largely applicable to NS & OS:
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E18752_01/html/817-5093/fsfilesysappx-23724.htmlhttp://docs.oracle.com/cd/E18752_01/html/817-5093/fsfilesysappx-20581.htmland also
http://fengnet.com/book/solaris_admin/ch01lev1sec18.htmlAnd on another note, I made a correction to my first post - one can of course have a total of 8 partitions [a-h]... it has been too long since I edited the disktab.