SunOS 4.x boot disk layout

[Doc Shipley]

Jules Richardson wrote:

> Does anyone happen to know the organisation of a SunOS 4.x hard drive?
> 
> Looking at the disklabel under Linux, I get the following:
> 
> | Disk /dev/sdb (Sun disk label): 15 heads, 131 sectors, 1701 
> |  cylinders Units = cylinders of 1965 * 512 bytes
> |
> |    Device Flag    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> | /dev/sdb1             0        48     47160    0  Empty
> | /dev/sdb2            48       152    102180    0  Empty
> | /dev/sdb3             0      1701   1671232+   0  Empty
> | /dev/sdb4           152       264    110040    0  Empty
> | /dev/sdb7           264      1701   1411852+   0  Empty
> 
> (ignoring the 'empty' - think that must be a bug in Linux fdisk as I
> know there's a valid OS on the disk)

   The ID of 0 and the "Empty" System label mean that fdisk doesn't 
recognize the partition type, or more likely in this case, the ID field 
in the partition/slice table at all.  It doesn't refer to whether 
there's data or filesystem on the slice.

> However, obviously some space is taken up by the partition table itself,
> so the first (root) partition can't start at block zero. What I'm trying
> to find out is the offset that it does actually start at, so that I can
> mount the root partition from Linux. 

   Given the output of fdisk, I'm going to guess that your Linux kernel 
doesn't support the SunOS 4 filesystem type.  I've got an email out to a 
friend who just installed on a 3/60 yesterday, so mayhap he can shedsome 
light on this.  Meantime, see if your kernel has "sysv" filesystem 
support.  I have a glimmer of a memory that that's what you'll need.  ;)


	Doc