Re: cilinder 0 and raw devices

Konstantin Ginzburg wrote:
>
> Hi all!
>
> Not too long ago I encountered a problem when installing Sybase on raw
> device. I was unfortunate to use cilinder 0 of phisical disk for such
> device. Evidentally, this cilinder is used for storing some vital
> information about the disk including its type, logical partitions, etc., that
> got overwritten during installation. Since I didn't have records about the
> way this disk was partitioned, I ended up repartitioning it and restoring
> everything from backups. Anyway, my question is: is it specific Sybase bug,
> or one should never allocate cilinder 0 to a raw device of any database
> vendor (Oracle, Informix, etc)? Thanks in advance.
>
> Konstantin Ginzburg

Be afraid. Be very afraid!

It's the same with Oracle. I saw a DBA at my previous site do it once on a SUN 4.1. Things worked fine until the next system boot. Then the disk was no longer recognized by the system.

This seems to go away with the new array storage devices out these days. Disk partitions are not defined the same anymore.

                       \\|//
                       (0-0)
           +-----oOO----(_)-----------+
           | Brian P. Mac Lean        |
           | Database Analyst         |
           | brian.maclean_at_teldta.com |
           | http://www.teldta.com    |
           +-------------------oOO----+
                      |__|__|
                       || ||
                      ooO Ooo