8.0rc1 not recognizing partitions on EPIA SN

[Gavin Atkinson]

On Sun, 18 Oct 2009, Daniel Nebdal wrote:
> 2009/10/17 Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no>:
>> Antony Mawer <lists at mawer.org> writes:
>>> Am I correct in reading this as saying that -any- system which was
>>> setup as dangerously dedicated will be unbootable under 8.0, and the
>>> only way to fix is to basically repartition and reinstall...? If so
>>> ... !!!
>>
>> You brought it upon yourself by setting it up that way in the first
>> place.  It's called *dangerously* dedicated for a reason.
>>
>
> Indeed, though I was under the impression that the reason was "nothing
> else will understand this", not "we might not support this in the
> future".

As I understand things, the problems are partially due to a bug in older 
versions of sysinstall that created incorrect disklables in DD mode, and 
partially due to the new GEOM partitioning modules, which now parse these 
ambiguous disk labels differently.

You can get around this by compiling a custom kernel and using the old 
partitioning modules (use GEOM_MBR and GEOM_BSD rather than GEOM_PART), 
but you may well just be postponing the problem as I believe the old 
modules were planned to be removed at some point.

Gavin