RE: Printing RDB partition table

From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On
Behalf Of Michael van Elst
Sent: viernes, 1 de octubre de 2021 7:48

Hi Michael!

> There is no native NetBSD tool to print (or edit) an RDB. But the
> partition table is translated into a standard BSD disklabel. The
> disklabel program can show the partitions, but you cannot change them.

sysinst is able to show them on the NetBSD install process, but my system is already installed, so I was looking for the very same as a standalone utility.

> One solution is to edit the RDB under AmigaOS with HDToolBox.

Indeed, I used it to prepare the partitions for NetBSD installation. However, I have 7 partitions on my hard disk and I need to know the order that NetBSD assigned as I intent to dump an image on one partition via dd utility. Without knowing the correct partition device (/dev/wd??) this would be very dangerous.

From the /etc/fstab I know the assigned order is not the same as they are defined in the RDB, as NetBSD root is 0 and swap 1.

> The other way is to not use an RDB, but a standard BSD disklabel.
> In that case however, you cannot use the same disk for AmigaOS anymore
> and if that's the boot disk, you need to use the boot block instead of
> something like loadbsd/gobsd.

Well, I have AmigaOS, GNU/Linux and NetBSD on the hard disk; so I cannot afford not using RDB. Thanks for the tip anyway, I didn't know it was even possible.
 
> N.B. I created a simple RDB editor for NetBSD, but it is not that
> userfriendly.

That's really nice! I do not need even to edit, just to print the NetBSD partition devices, their size and RDB name.

Thanks for the tips :)

Regards,
Carlos

Carlos Milán Figueredo | HispaMSX System Operator | http://www.hispamsx.org | telnet://bbs.hispamsx.org | https://calnus.com