Can't modify partitions

[Joshua Oreman]

On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 12:34:27AM -0700 or thereabouts, James Taylor seemed to write:
> I have a disk /dev/da0 currently partitioned as one 36
> gig partition, with no point point specified.  I'm not
> sure how the mount point got through like that, but it
> seems that because of it I'm unable to make any
> changes to the disk.  I go into sysinstall(can't run
> disklabel - it's a sparc64 machine)->Custom->Label and
> delete the partition (/dev/da0d).  I then go to write
> the information and come up with "ERROR: Unable to
> write data to disk da0!".  No matter what I do I keep
> getting this error when trying to make any change to
> the disk.  
> 
> I've tried doing something like "dd if=/dev/zero
> of=/dev/da0d count=1000000" trying to just wipe out
> the MBR and maybe get a little bit more for good
> measure, but that didn't seem to work.  Doing any dd
> operations on just /dev/da0 come back with Operation
> not permitted (I'm assuming this is intended
> behaviour?)
> 
> How do I clear the partition information on this
> drive? It's been driving me nuts for the past week or
> so.

I'll assume two things.
1) You're running 5.x.
2) The drive is in use (somehow). FS mounted? Try `sysctl -b kern.geom.confxml`

If this is the case, then GEOM has managed to keep you from shooting
yourself in the foot :-)
You may want to boot off a fixit disk so you're sure nothing's using the disk.

HTH,
-- Josh

> 
> Thanks
> 
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