bsdlabel partiton c error message on new install

[Ulf Lilleengen]

On fre, okt 17, 2008 at 04:16:14pm +0100, andys wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> on a newly installed FreeBSD 7.0 system on a dell 1950 server I see the 
> following error from bsdlabel. Is there any known issues with this or is the 
> only reasonable explanation that I have managed to mess it up without even 
> knowing? :P And should I manually change the partition c to fix the prob? Is 
> this safe to do? 
> 
> bsdlabel -A /dev/da0s1
> # /dev/da0s1:
> type: SCSI
> disk: da0s1
> label:
> flags:
> bytes/sector: 512
> sectors/track: 63
> tracks/cylinder: 255
> sectors/cylinder: 16065
> cylinders: 17750
> sectors/unit: 285155328
> rpm: 3600
> interleave: 1
> trackskew: 0
> cylinderskew: 0
> headswitch: 0           # milliseconds
> track-to-track seek: 0  # milliseconds
> drivedata: 0 
> 
> 8 partitions:
> #        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
> a: 20971520        0    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552
> b: 20971520 75497472      swap
> c: 285153687        0    unused        0     0         # "raw" part, don't 
     285155328
> edit
> d: 20971520 20971520    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552
> e: 20971520 41943040    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552
> f: 12582912 62914560    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552
> bsdlabel: partition c doesn't cover the whole unit!
> bsdlabel: An incorrect partition c may cause problems for standard system 
> utilities 
> 
> 
> thanks for any advice, Im not really confident with the FreeBSD disk 
> management as I havent used it much, 
Hello,

This is completely ok. The reasons that you might get warnings like this is
that fdisk tries to put the sector number on a cylinder boundary. If that
means that the partition is larger than the actual disklabel size, that is
ok. What would have been a problem is if the disklabel extends past the
partition size! (I think the installer makes sure this does not happen).

You do waste a few sectors because of this, but unless you are really
interested in getting them back, I would not start bothering with it. One way
to "fix" it is to do a bsdlabel -e  and change
c: 285153687        0    unused        0     0  
to
c: 285155328        0    unused	       0     0

But again, it is not many sectors that is currently wasted.

-- 
Ulf Lilleengen