Date:        Sun, 4 Oct 1998 20:47:29 -0700 (PDT)
    From:        Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com>
    Message-ID:  <199810050347.UAA15951@shell17.ba.best.com>

    Unfortunately yes it is, but to reuse that entry means a definite change in
    the interpretation of disklabels, and that creates a format transition which
    should not be taken lightly.

Not if the change were just to remove the magic interpretations, and
go back to the way things used to be, where (assuming there is a label
on the drive at all) the label is king, and you always use the label.

    I think cjs was trying to say that it already does:

Yes, I know.   It may be that we'll be stuck forever with the 'c' is
special (or perhaps DISKPART(dev) == 2 is special) interpretation, even
though it was a pretty dumb choice - it came about because since forever
people used 0 for the root filesys, and 1 for the swap partition, so
when another convention was needed 2 seemed like the obvious choice.
With hindsight, it would have been better to switch back then, and make
0 be the whole disk, but ...
    
kre