Why is 'disklabel'ng a new drive so difficult?

[Kris Kennaway]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 05:26:49PM -0300, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> 
> Just bought a new WD SATA drive: WDC WD5000YS-01MPB1 09.02E09
> 
> Tried to disklabel it, and it gives me all kinds of warnings when I look at it 
> after running the disklabel:
> 
> 
> ganymede# bsdlabel -w ad4s1 auto
> ganymede# bsdlabel ad4s1c
> # /dev/ad4s1c:
> 8 partitions:
> #        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
>   a: 976767986       79    unused        0     0
>   c: 976768002       63    unused        0     0         # "raw" part, don't 
> edit
> partition a: partition extends past end of unit
> partition c: partition extends past end of unit
> bsdlabel: partition c doesn't start at 0!
> bsdlabel: An incorrect partition c may cause problems for standard system 
> utilities
> 
> Even if I try to use /stand/sysinstall to do the fdisk, the end result has 
> 'issues' ...
> 
> So, what is the generally accepted method of label'ng a new drive? :(

I learned a useful trick the other day: you can use abbreviations like
"1g", also '*' to mean "automatically calculate".  See the manpage.

Kris