[9fans] Strange Plan9 Reinstallation Phenomonon

[9fans] Strange Plan9 Reinstallation Phenomonon

[Greg Pavelcak]

I had Plan 9 on an IDE hard drive.  I decided to go back to FreeBSD, so I
installed FreeBSD 4.9 on the same drive as a replacement, making no
effort to dual boot, I told BSD to use the whole disk.  Then I got a
second computer and figured that I can now use either Plan9 or FreeBSD
as the spirit moves me.  I reinstalled Plan9 on the IDE drive I
started with.  I deleted the FreeBSD partition in fdisk and let Plan9
use the whole disk.  The `copy distribution' part went like lightning
and when I rebooted, not only did I have Plan9, but I had the same
setup I had a couple days before just before the BSD installation.

I've been using the Plan 9 for a little while now, and it seems to be
working.  My question is do you think I can expect this to work, or is
this a real fluke?  I had actually done quite a bit with the FreeBSD:
building from sources and installing quite a few ports.

Thanks

Greg

Re: [9fans] Strange Plan9 Reinstallation Phenomonon

[Russ Cox]

> The `copy distribution' part went like lightning
> and when I rebooted, not only did I have Plan9, but I had the same
> setup I had a couple days before just before the BSD installation.
>
> I've been using the Plan 9 for a little while now, and it seems to be
> working.  My question is do you think I can expect this to work, or is
> this a real fluke?  I had actually done quite a bit with the FreeBSD:
> building from sources and installing quite a few ports.

I'd run a check on the file system, but it's quite possible.
Plan 9 is small, and it's likely that your BSD setup was carefully
using only a few blocks from each cylinder group and completely
missed it.

Russ