A wizard should know better!

A wizard should know better!

[Eric J Bowman]

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Actually, I'm trying to figure out what the wizard knows... the proper arcane incantations. Here's what I see in the format utility:



1,!active,EFI,0,38933,38934,100%

Enter Selection: 6



This is where my i/o error occurs, regardless of 6 or 7, 99 times out of 100. The other times, I get this:



format> label

[0] SMI Label

[1] EFI Label

Specify Label type[1]:



With [1] being the correct answer, after which point I never get the i/o error again, and partition 1 goes "active" when I name s3 "system".



How'd I do that? I do not know. But I've been cursing at a wizard that actually does know better, lol. When this works, I proceed with a conventional GPT partitioning scheme which achieves the cross-platform, cross-media, cross-OS compatibility/interoperability I set out to accomplish.



This is why I can't just use the Tribblix ./format-a-disk.sh, SMI allows that s2 "backup" partition to overlap, etc. etc. which does not work with EFI or other OS's. Yes, I know how to use fmthard to get that SMI/EFI choice, but the "format" wizard's utilities won't work with it, sooner or later that i/o error crops up.


-Eric

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Re: [discuss] A wizard should know better!

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On Thu, 23 May 2024 at 09:23, Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss
<discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote:
> Here's what I see in the format utility:
>
> 1,!active,EFI,0,38933,38934,100%
> Enter Selection: 6
>
> This is where my i/o error occurs, regardless of 6 or 7, 99 times out of 100. The other times, I get this:
>
> format> label
> [0] SMI Label
> [1] EFI Label
> Specify Label type[1]:
>
> With [1] being the correct answer, after which point I never get the i/o error again, and partition 1 goes "active" when I name s3 "system".

Can you paste a complete terminal transcript, including the invocation
of the format command and all of the output?

Cheers.

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
http://blog.sysmgr.org

Re: [discuss] A wizard should know better!

[Eric J Bowman]

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Nope, sorry. I'm on webmail out here at the ranch, "over the edge" of the network. Do you know how to use an Android phone to capture terminal output from an i386 running Solaris?



-Eric






---- On Thu, 23 May 2024 09:41:41 -0700 Joshua M. Clulow via illumos-discuss <discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote ---



On Thu, 23 May 2024 at 09:23, Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss 
<mailto:discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote: 
> Here's what I see in the format utility: 
> 
> 1,!active,EFI,0,38933,38934,100% 
> Enter Selection: 6 
> 
> This is where my i/o error occurs, regardless of 6 or 7, 99 times out of 100. The other times, I get this: 
> 
> format> label 
> [0] SMI Label 
> [1] EFI Label 
> Specify Label type[1]: 
> 
> With [1] being the correct answer, after which point I never get the i/o error again, and partition 1 goes "active" when I name s3 "system". 
 
Can you paste a complete terminal transcript, including the invocation 
of the format command and all of the output? 
 
Cheers. 
 
-- 
Joshua M. Clulow 
http://blog.sysmgr.org 
 
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Re: [discuss] A wizard should know better!

[Dale Ghent]

> On May 23, 2024, at 12:57, Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss <discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote:
> 
> Nope, sorry. I'm on webmail out here at the ranch, "over the edge" of the network. Do you know how to use an Android phone to capture terminal output from an i386 running Solaris?

Yeah, one tethers a laptop through the phone instead of pecking things out on a phone's screen. It's pretty cool tech and I highly recommend it.

/dale

Re: [discuss] A wizard should know better!

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On Thu, 23 May 2024 at 09:58, Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss
<discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote:
> Nope, sorry. I'm on webmail out here at the ranch, "over the edge" of the network. Do you know how to use an Android phone to capture terminal output from an i386 running Solaris?

Presuming you mean illumos, I guess you could take photographs of it?
It would be best if you could use an SSH client so that you can copy
and paste text, though, obviously.  You could use something like the
ConnectBot SSH client for Android, perhaps.

Cheers.

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
http://blog.sysmgr.org

Re: [discuss] A wizard should know better!

[Eric J Bowman]

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Thanks, but that isn't the problem I'm trying to solve, when I'm only running illumos on the laptop I'm partitioning, and that from a 2GB TF card which does not show up in format -e because I'm using a dual-chip USB card reader. Tribblix-minimal.iso's my quick reboot to format> after selecting disk0, which varies from SATA internal/external SSD/HDD, USB (i.e. SCSI) SSD/HDD + NVMe.



My solution to the problem you want me to solve today, is the partitioning scheme I'm working on. Once I've worked my way up the stack a bit, I'll be sharing two .iso's over IPFS, to go you one better by providing two bootable environments, both functional, one with the error the other without the error. Then we can talk about what tools report any difference between the two, if you dd'd 'em to two identical "drives."



Because I haven't found any, yet. Which is why I'm asking the questions I'm asking, I'd love to include a README which explains how to reproduce my steps.



-Eric






---- On Thu, 23 May 2024 10:06:01 -0700 Dale Ghent <daleg@elemental.org> wrote ---



> On May 23, 2024, at 12:57, Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss <mailto:discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote: 
> 
> Nope, sorry. I'm on webmail out here at the ranch, "over the edge" of the network. Do you know how to use an Android phone to capture terminal output from an i386 running Solaris? 
 
Yeah, one tethers a laptop through the phone instead of pecking things out on a phone's screen. It's pretty cool tech and I highly recommend it. 
 
/dale 
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Re: [discuss] A wizard should know better!

[Eric J Bowman]

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The i/o error is simple to reproduce. Take an erased NVMe drive, use format> fdisk and either answer "yes" to "100% SOLARIS2", or "no" and select whatever you like, I suggest "EFI". Make it stick, with a FAT32 ESP with flags set to "boot, efi" or setting the partition active in fdisk. What I can't tell you is what steps to follow to make it say both "100% EFI" in format> fd, *and* have format> label *then* ask if I want an SMI or EFI label. Toggle solaris/solaris2 all you like.



-Eric






---- On Thu, 23 May 2024 09:22:55 -0700 Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss <discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote ---



Actually, I'm trying to figure out what the wizard knows... the proper arcane incantations. Here's what I see in the format utility:



1,!active,EFI,0,38933,38934,100%

Enter Selection: 6



This is where my i/o error occurs, regardless of 6 or 7, 99 times out of 100. The other times, I get this:



format> label

[0] SMI Label

[1] EFI Label

Specify Label type[1]:



With [1] being the correct answer, after which point I never get the i/o error again, and partition 1 goes "active" when I name s3 "system".



How'd I do that? I do not know. But I've been cursing at a wizard that actually does know better, lol. When this works, I proceed with a conventional GPT partitioning scheme which achieves the cross-platform, cross-media, cross-OS compatibility/interoperability I set out to accomplish.



This is why I can't just use the Tribblix ./format-a-disk.sh, SMI allows that s2 "backup" partition to overlap, etc. etc. which does not work with EFI or other OS's. Yes, I know how to use fmthard to get that SMI/EFI choice, but the "format" wizard's utilities won't work with it, sooner or later that i/o error crops up.



-Eric





https://illumos.topicbox.com/latest / illumos-discuss / see https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss + https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/members + https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T2a5c9e4dbedfaf21-Mbbaf47acb5b6a4331e7c8882

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Re: [discuss] A wizard should know better!

[Eric J Bowman]

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> 

> format> label 

> [0] SMI Label 

> [1] EFI Label 

> Specify Label type[1]: 

>



This dialog, when booted in protected mode (I never should have encountered it on my laptop), indicates CSM firmware present. The format utility won't allow SMI on UEFI w/o CSM mobos, +1 UEFI point for the kernel!

-Eric

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Re: [discuss] A wizard should know better!

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On Sat, 29 Jun 2024 at 14:58, Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss
<discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote:
> > format> label
> > [0] SMI Label
> > [1] EFI Label
> > Specify Label type[1]:
> This dialog, when booted in protected mode (I never should have encountered it on my laptop), indicates CSM firmware present. The format utility won't allow SMI on UEFI w/o CSM mobos, +1 UEFI point for the kernel!

No, that menu indicates that you are using the "expert mode" of
format; i.e., you passed the "-e" flag.


Cheers.

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
http://blog.sysmgr.org

Re: [discuss] A wizard should know better!

[Eric J Bowman]

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I got that somewhat wrong. What's happening is SATA doesn't get asked that question, even if it's on a SCSI port (I have a USB-A 3.1 gen 2 or whatever to NVMe m.2 M key, and my laptop's internal swappable SATA drive is a Honda connector to dual PCIe m.2 M key, with a single M/B-keyed drive; two shows up as one to the firmware but ZFS can mirror); PCIe or NVMe M key on a SATA port will also not get asked the SMI/EFI question.



You'll wind up with 12.5 MiB Solaris Reserved because it's assumed that SATA is 512b circle-not-square and that's how big one cylinder is.





The Wizard could gain +1 UEFI-lore point by asking if the user intends the drive in question to be a boot drive. Otherwise, you can easily wind up with non-illumos-bootable GPT partitioning, or non-UEFI w/o CSM MBR partitioning (a la Ventoy and Rufus btw), instead of PMBR. I'm using format to create and partition my boot drives nonetheless, and so far so good with non-PMBR GPT multiboot partitioning.




My forward-interop advice is not to use SATA for boot drives. I'm using lappy's internal bay as a 2TB ZFS mirror (using SK Hynix P31 gold ssd's) as my zone pool. External boot-to-RAM. Internal Compact Express slot has 128GB NVMe drive, and while this is technically a slower interface than SATA, effectively it's higher iops on non-sequential workloads, so it's my L2ARC as I only have 16GB of system RAM. My V110 Gen3 now outperforms my Gen7 on iops, albeit with higher power consumption (mostly due to being 7yo vs. 1yo equipment, I also have a Gen5 but it's out on long-term loan).



-Eric







---- On Sat, 29 Jun 2024 14:57:39 -0700 Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss <discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote ---



> 

> format> label 

> [0] SMI Label 

> [1] EFI Label 

> Specify Label type[1]: 

>



This dialog, when booted in protected mode (I never should have encountered it on my laptop), indicates CSM firmware present. The format utility won't allow SMI on UEFI w/o CSM mobos, +1 UEFI point for the kernel!

-Eric



https://illumos.topicbox.com/latest / illumos-discuss / see https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss + https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/members + https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T2a5c9e4dbedfaf21-Me82010a903b649ad4dd0d024

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Re: [discuss] A wizard should know better!

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On Mon, 1 Jul 2024 at 20:41, Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss
<discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote:
> I got that somewhat wrong. What's happening is SATA doesn't get asked that question, even if it's on a SCSI port (I have a USB-A 3.1 gen 2 or whatever to NVMe m.2 M key, and my laptop's internal swappable SATA drive is a Honda connector to dual PCIe m.2 M key, with a single M/B-keyed drive; two shows up as one to the firmware but ZFS can mirror); PCIe or NVMe M key on a SATA port will also not get asked the SMI/EFI question.

I think there is some confusion here about the form factor (M.2) and
the interface (NVMe, SATA, etc).  At any rate, as I said earlier, you
get the menu if you invoke "format -e".  Otherwise, you don't get the
menu:

    https://src.illumos.org/source/xref/illumos-gate/usr/src/cmd/format/menu_command.c?r=96d99ca9#1558-1586

I don't believe any of this is based on the kind of firmware your
system has, the mode in which you are booted, or anything in
particular about the disk you're using.  The one caveat is that large
drives get a GPT/EFI label by default, and smaller drives (for
backwards compatibility) still get the old style MBR/VTOC label,
unless you use "format -e" to request a GPT/EFI label.

> You'll wind up with 12.5 MiB Solaris Reserved because it's assumed that SATA is 512b circle-not-square and that's how big one cylinder is.

I don't believe this is true.  SATA disks can have a variety of
reported block sizes; e.g., 4096 bytes.  I would expect every SATA
device that exists to use LBA; any mention of cylinders at this point
is vestigial.

> My forward-interop advice is not to use SATA for boot drives.

SATA drives work just fine for booting.


Cheers.

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
http://blog.sysmgr.org