Re: Changes in disk layout in VAX?????

> On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 03:54:50PM -0400, [email protected] wrote:
> > I was installing a snapshot from several days ago onto an
> > RZ25 drive to use as a cloning drive onto other machines
> > and noticed that the disklabel would not let me have the
> > first 518 sectors of the disk, but seemed to reserve that
> > for some reason.  Is this new, and what is this doing?
> > Thanks
> 
> It isn't new. The first cylinder is reserved for the boot blocks.
> 
> (On many platform, the first cylinder is reserved for boot blocks.
> That's how it is on my vax and hppa computers.)
> 
> (It won't need all the cylinder but anyway, the FFS format doesn't
> like not starting or ending on cylinder boundary.)
> 
An ffs filesystem actually leaves the first 8k on a partition free, 
that also includes the first partition on disk. And the vax only need
a little less than 8k for its boot block, so reserving a cylinder for
it sounds like a waste of disk space.

-- Ragge