dangerously dedicated disks and 8-stable status

[A. Wright]

On Fri, 7 May 2010, krad wrote:

> FYI happened on 2nd box as well but I least it didnt catch me out this time
> 8). It seems that pre freebsd-8 it is permissible to use format
> <dev>s1[a-h]  , however in freebsd-8+ to you are forced to use the  format
> <dev>[a-h].

I have noted peculiarities also in this move (as noted above:
8.0-RELEASE upgrade -- no files visible), but different ones
from what you are seeing.

I have begun to suspect that part of the issue is that my
drives at one time were set up in "dangerously dedicated"
mode, but later changed to "slice-based" mode.  It may be
that there are still sectors near the beginning of the disk
with old information in them.

Currently I have one disk remaining from the old setup, for
which I only get /dev entries produced for the device, and
for partition 'a' (ie, /dev/ad10, /dev/ad10a), however if
accessed from 7.2, I can see and mount /dev/ad10s1[a,d-g].

Might your disks have similar "old" information in the first
track (but not in the first sector), or do you refer to a
new disk, or one to which a number of sectors of zeros was
written?

Thanks for the info,
A.