I've been trying to move the installed OSes around on my hard disk, but
am having a huge amount of trouble doing so.
The task involves dd'ing the slices off the disk for safe-keeping,
modifying the on-disk slice table, then dd'ing the slices back onto the
disk in their new locations. However, sysinstall doesn't work for
manipulating the slice table and labels. It gives me errors saying it
couldn't write to the device. Manually doing the work using fdisk and
disklabel yield multiple problems:
- Fdisk returns device busy errors when trying to write to the slice
table to make a modification to a slice that has no mounted filesystems.
I can only modify the slice table if I boot from either DOS or an
off-disk OS (like the Fix-It CD).
- After the slice is created and I've rebooted back into 5.0p1, the lack
of a /dev/ad4s1c device node means I have to use `disklabel -w -r ad4s1
auto` to create the c partition, then `disklabel -e -r ad4s1` to modify
the label. The editor comes up with a label with the c partition offset
of 0. I add the other partitions making calculations to ensure the
partitions start/end on boundaries. Exiting the editor, disklabel
complains that the 'c' partition doesn't begin with sector 0 and doesn't
cover the whole disk, and also that my last partition goes past the end
of the unit. Reeditting the label, the offsets are now shifted by 63.
Re-adjusting the partition sizes and offsets doesn't fix the problem
even though the numbers indicate that everything is aligned properly and
within the slice boundaries.
After growing quite frustrated with this, I gave up and booted into DOS
and was able to create the slice. Booting back into 5.0p1, fdisk tells
me the slice is fine, and the size and geometry are an exact match to
what I was trying to make fdisk use. All that's left is to dd the
original slice back into place, but `dd if=win98.ad4s1 of=/dev/ad4s1
bs=1024k` returns an error saying that writing to ad4s1 failed because
the device is busy. How can the device be busy?
The above practices have worked fine for a long time in 4.x and still do
even in 4.7p4, which is on this same machine. The disklabel in 4.7p4
doesn't complain about the state of the labels, and sysinstall can
manipulate the slice table and labels just fine on the live disk.
What's changed in 5.x to make this not work, and what do I need to do to
accomplish my task?
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