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

[Jerry McAllister]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 09:56:04AM +1000, Antony Mawer wrote:

> On 30/03/2007 9:22 AM, Jerry McAllister wrote:
> >On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 08:07:23AM +1000, Antony Mawer wrote:
> ...
> >>Is it important to use 16 as the offset still, or is this a historical 
> >>piece of information that is no longer relevant? Or is this is a bug in 
> >>disklabel that should be fixed?
> >
> >As I indicated in another post in this thread, it appears to
> >be vestigial.    I have never used it for a bsdlabel(disklabel)
> >being done on a slice - since 1998.
> 
> I just went back and re-read your other messages in the thread. I must 
> have glossed over that part of them - my apologies! I too looked at my 
> sysinstall-created labels, and they were all at offset of 0.
> 
> I actually started writing my own partitioning/labelling tool based on 
> libdisk, as part of a custom install CD I was building, but discovered 
> that it did not support non-disk devices (eg. gmirror)... I started 
> looking at trying to hack support into libdisk to do so (and made some 
> success), but in the end decided that it was probably a task better 
> suited for someone that knows libdisk better than I...

Interesting.   I have never monkeyed with that.
Maybe I should.   I might learn something.

////jerry


> 
> As a result I went back to looking at fdisk/bsdlabel to see what I could 
> do using them instead...
>