BSD equivalent of GNU parted Post: 302298497

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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers BSD equivalent of GNU parted Post 302298497 by uiop44 on Tuesday 17th of March 2009 05:01:15 PM

03-17-2009

Registered User

Thanks for the info. I will read more about BSD's fdisk.
I suspect that is what sysinstall uses. I also want to understand more about bsdlabel.

On the topic of boot loaders... I can only tell you what works for me...

How does the boot process work? Someone please correct this if this is wrong...

1. BIOS ROM reads MBR of 1st disk
2. MBR reads boot sector of active (primary) partition (the one with the boot flag)
3. Bootloader on that partition boots the OS it was designed for

You can have up to 4 partitions and hence 4 OS's specified to the MBR... these are the four 16 byte table entries often called the partition table. They're tacked onto the MBR. Selecting a partition (OS) to boot from is as easy as setting a flag (0x00 --> 0x80 at offset 0x000) in this table.

Four is more than enough OS selection for my needs

If you want to have more than that or have a need to put an OS on an extended partition (i.e. on one of the logical drives contained therein), then a "universal" bootloader like GRUB makes sense

You have to insert this (foreign) bootloader into the process, between steps 2 and 3
The MBR has to find the foreign bootloader
I do not understand exactly how that works
There is a simpler more direct way

If you are only booting a few OS's and have the disk space to create a few primary partitions, why be so indirect when booting? Make the partition you want active and let the boot process proceed as it is expected to do... by the people who develop these OS's.

Last edited by uiop44; 03-17-2009 at 06:40 PM..

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acorn-fdisk

FDISK(8)						    BSD System Manager's Manual 						  FDISK(8)

NAME

     acorn-fdisk -- partition editor for Acorn/RISC OS machines

SYNOPSIS

     acorn-fdisk -h | --help | -v | --version

     acorn-fdisk [-t scheme | --type scheme] -l | --list [device ...]

     acorn-fdisk [-t scheme | --type scheme] -s | --size partition

     acorn-fdisk [-t scheme | --type scheme] [device]

DESCRIPTION

     The acorn-fdisk utility allows one to display or interactively edit partition tables for Acorn/RISC OS machines in various formats.  Using
     the PC/BIOS format, standard IBM PC (i386) partition tables can also be accessed.	When no optional device is given, it defaults to /dev/hda
     or /dev/sda.

     The options are as follows:

     -h | --help  Display a short usage and exit immediately.

     -l | --list  Display the partition table(s) of all devices.

     -s | --size  Display the size of partition.

     -t | --type  Select the partitioning scheme to use.  Valid schemes are:

		  EESOX 	   Eesox SCSI on the Acorn machines.

		  ICSIDEFS	   ICS IDE.

		  Filecore/Linux   Linux on Filecore.  This uses the non-ADFS descriptor to point to the start of the disc to be partitioned.  The
				   first two sectors contain a partition table to identify the Linux partitions contained within.

		  PC/BIOS	   PC/BIOS partitioning scheme.  This consists of a partition table in the first sector of the disk which contains
				   both CHS and LBA values for the partitions.	There can be up to four entries in the primary partition table.
				   One of these can be an extended partition containing up to four extra partitions.

		  PowerTec	   PowerTec SCSI on the Acorn machines.

		  Filecore/RISCiX  RiscIX on Filecore.

     -v | --version
		  Display the version of acorn-fdisk and exit immediately.

     If neither -l | --list or -s | --size are given, the partition table of the given device will be edited interactively.

EXAMPLES

     Display the default device's partition table on a PC:

	   acorn-fdisk --type PC/BIOS -l

     Display the PC partition table of /dev/sda:

	   acorn-fdisk --type PC/BIOS --list /dev/sda

     Display the size in blocks of the partition /dev/sda1:

	   acorn-fdisk --type PC/BIOS --size /dev/sda1

     Edit the MBR partition table interactively:

	   acorn-fdisk --type PC/BIOS

     Display the partition table of an MBR backed up to a file:

	   acorn-fdisk -t PC/BIOS -l mbrdump.bin

     Display the size of the first partition on a device where the MBR would be restored from the backup file mbrdump.bin:

	   acorn-fdisk -t PC/BIOS -s mbrdump.bin1

AUTHORS

     arm-fdisk was written by Russell King <rmk@arm.uk.linux.org> based on util-linux fdisk, which was written at least partially by
     A. V. Le Blanc <LeBlanc@mcc.ac.uk>.

     This manual page was written for the Debian system by
     Thorsten Glaser <tg@debian.org> but may be used by others.

BSD
								  October 2, 2010							       BSD