# Seagate hard disks ship with a FreeBSD partition?



## aragon (Aug 28, 2009)

Has anyone noticed this?  I've recently bought two 7200.12 1TB drives and they both had a single partition spanning the full size of the drive that was flagged as a FreeBSD partition (sysid 165).

The partition is invalid though.  No disklabel and no valid file system.

Interesting...


----------



## fronclynne (Aug 29, 2009)

*ohpleaseohplease let me put freebsd on this disk!*

Hrm, when I `# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 count=20 && fdisk /dev/da1` it defaults to saying there's a sysid 165 partition.  Is fdisk just being hopeful then?


----------



## jb_fvwm2 (Aug 29, 2009)

I recall reading (once!) that fdisk reports a default (4?) 165's.  So
if you have just one partition, three more would appear as 
bsd...  Probably just a default background upon which to
describe actual partition types.


----------



## aragon (Aug 29, 2009)

Interesting.  Could be.  I never did double check with anything else except FreeBSD's fdisk util.


----------



## Carpetsmoker (Sep 2, 2009)

If there is no MBR fdisk(8) reports one 165 partition.
This is for all disks.
Not sure if this is a feature or a bug, but it's been like this at leats since FreeBSD 4.

OpenBSD doesn't do this, it just prints an empty MBR.


----------



## rolle (Sep 3, 2009)

It depends on the "MBR signature" (AA55).

If the table of partitions is mt, but the Signature is available
FreeBSD's fdisk will also show an mt table.
This you can achieve by deleting all partitions in sysinstall or sade and save.

If no signature is given, the hole table is non valid.


----------

