8.0-RELEASE and "dangerously dedicated" disks

[Jerry McAllister]

On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 09:48:05AM -0800, Randi Harper wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 7:23 AM, Jerry McAllister <jerrymc at msu.edu> wrote:
> > Some of the responses have said that UFS handling of 'Dangerously
> > dedicated' has not gone away, just sysinstall handling of it.
> > That may be true and if that is true, then you can probably still
> > access dangerously dedicated drives.   But, I would think it is a
> > good opportunity to convert them while the uncertainty reigns.
> 
> Once again, it has nothing at all to do with UFS. Clearly you didn't
> search the mailing list archives like I said you should. I removed the
> support from sysinstall because it was *broken* due to changes with
> geom. It is not a sysinstall thing, it's a "oh look, sysinstall lets
> you do something that doesn't work anymore" thing. You'd think if the
> person that made these changes to sysinstall was commenting on the
> issue, that should clear up any uncertainty. But you can go ahead
> believing whatever makes you happy.

OK.  If it is a geom thing, then its a geom thing.
The statement that it might be a good time to convert dangerously
dedicated disks to sliced and partitioned drives is still the
point of the piece you quoted and still is valid.

ALthough I have made a few DD disks in the past, I do not run with
them and so don't really care other than someone was asking about it.
Since I do not use DD disks, I am assuming this doesn't affect me.
For someone else, the best thing to do is back up their stuff,
rebuild the disk with the appropriate utilities (fdisk/bsdlabel/newfs
or whatever works for you) and restore their stuff.

////jerry

> 
> -- randi
>