View Single Post
Old 12th August 2009
jggimi's Avatar
jggimi jggimi is online now
More noise than signal
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
Posts: 7,977
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by gosha View Post
I thought restoring the system (no fresh install) would not create a new disklabel, or does it in fact?
The disklabel sector is is read from the drive during boot. If there is a valid disklabel, it is retained in system memory. The disklabel(8) utility will use the copy-in-memory unless the admin specifically requests the hard drive's copy be re-read from disk, or, that both the hard drive's disklabel and the in-memory copy be ignored. See the -c and -d option descriptions of the disklabel(8) man page.

The disklabel's sector location varies by architecture. For i386/amd64, it is in the second sector of the OpenBSD MBR partition. If you move the location of the OpenBSD MBR partition on the drive, you will no longer have a valid disklabel.

You used dump/restore. Were your OpenBSD partitions already in the disklabel, or did you have to recreate them? If you recreated them, that would indicate no disklabel found on disk.

AFAIK, newfs(8), dump(8), and restore(8) will not touch the disklabel sector, which in this case, is part of your "a" partition.
Reply With Quote