DENIS%EVAX.P-E-T.Mankato.MSUS.EDU@cunyvm.cuny.edu (10/08/90)
I have upgraded my SUN sparc1's (5) to 4.1. About a week or two after the upgrade, one of the system disks (sd0) seemed to have its label corrupted. The machine wouldn't boot - the message I got were: Booting from: sd(0,0,0) vmunux Can't read disk label Can't read boot blocks Boot load failed nor could I use format on the disk because format couldn't find sd0 - got: # format searching for disks... sd0: offline About a week after that the exact same thing happened on another sparc. (sd0 is a Quantum 105mb drive and each sparc has two of them). I called sun software support and they didn't think the drive problems were related to the new os but it seems extremely coincidental that this same problem should occur so close together. Has anyone else had similar experiences?? Are the disk dying of natural causes?? (They are a little over 1 yr old.) Is there any way to recreate a label for the drives?? Denis Becker denis@msus1.bitnet
slevy@poincare.geom.umn.edu (Stuart Levy) (11/04/90)
Something to watch for if you're losing disk labels -- or, better, when
you're partitioning disks:
* DON'T HAVE A SWAP PARTITION BEGINNING AT CYLINDER 0 OF ANY DISK! *
We found this by bitter experience. The disk label is sector 0 of
cylinder 0. Filesystems carefully avoid messing with sector 0 of their
first cylinder, but swap partitions use all the space they're given and
happily erase sector 0. If you've no other use for the space, just start
the swap area (typically partition "b") at cylinder 1.
Stuart Levy, Geometry Group, University of Minnesota
slevy@geom.umn.edu