re-fdisk'ing a partition - permission denied?

[Jason Stone]

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> You have hit one of the main issues still to be resolved in GEOM. (I
> don't know that phk thinks it's a problem to be resolved or a feature to
> be documented.)
>
> In any case, since GEOM was added you can no longer slice or label an
> active device.

Ah - is that to say that, in general, you can't mess with the disk's MBR?

I was also running into this.  The situation that I have is that I have a
bunch of colocated machines that are set in the bios to try booting a hard
disk, and then, failing that, pxe netboot.  I keep a pxeboot server there
in the colo with an up-to-date binary release, and when I want to upgrade
a machine, I just overwrite the mbr with zeros and reboot.  The bios will
then netboot, and the release is scripted to be noninteractive, to wipe
the disks and re-install and then reboot the system when it's done.

If I can't touch the mbr on the running system, then I won't be able to
work this way anymore.  Is there some other alternative?

If I were running linux, I could write to /dev/nvram to update the bios
cmos settings from the running system - does freebsd have a similar way to
access the bios cmos settings?


 -Jason

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 Freud himself was a bit of a cold fish, and one cannot avoid the suspicion
 that he was insufficiently fondled when he was an infant.
	-- Ashley Montagu
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