Re: Removing fdisk and bsdlabel (legacy partition tools)

> On Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 9:11?AM Ed Maste <emaste@freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 25 Jan 2024 at 11:00, Rodney W. Grimes
> > <freebsd-rwg@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > > These will need to be addressed before actually removing any of these
> > > > binaries, of course.
> > >
> > > You seem to have missed /rescue.  Now think about that long
> > > and hard, these tools classified as so important that they
> > > are part of /rescue.  Again I can not stress enough how often
> > > I turn to these tools in a repair mode situation.
> >
> > I haven't missed rescue, it is included in the work in progress I
> > mentioned. Note that rescue has included gpart since 2007.
> >
> 
> What can fdisk and/or disklabel repair that gpart can't?

As far as I know there is no way in gpart to get to the
MBR cyl/hd/sec values, you can only get to the LBA start
and end values:
sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
    start 63, size 8388513 (4095 Meg), flag 80 (active)
        beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
        end: cyl 1023/ head 15/ sector 63

gpart show ada0
=>     63  8388545  ada0  MBR  (4.0G)
       63  8388513     1  freebsd  [active]  (4.0G)
  8388576       32        - free -  (16K)

Now I have learned that gpart backup/restore CAN get me
at least basic bsdlabel -e function, but again it has
no access to all the stuff stored that showsup with
bsdlabel -A.  Which this is now the third time I have
asked "how do I do bsdlabel -A -e with gpart"?  One
person at least answered that with:
gpart backup GEOM >backup
vi backup
gpart restore GEOM

Now I just have to rewrite my bsdlabel GEOM >backup
files to be be gpart GEOM >backup files (I have precanned
sets of bsdlabel files I use to do bsdlabel -w GEOM with.

> Warner
-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes@freebsd.org