Bill Studenmund writes:
> > for me. There is a man page that speaks about cd0d or something
> > and I need to use cd0c or a as I recall.
> 
> What port are you running? On i386, for historical reasons, partition 'd'
> is the whole-disk partition, whereas on (almost?) all other ports,
> partition 'c' is the whole-disk partition.

aha... that explains the xx0d references. however, this is not
clear from any docs I've come across. 

btw, my system is a multia (alpha)

> 
> 
> The difference is that vnconfig is not a loopback filesystem, but a
> loopback disk (to butcher terminology). It configures a files as a virtual
> disk. The difference is that you can then partition this disk, and do a
> whole lot more than just look at a filesystem. :-)

This also is good to know, and not apparent from the docs. I see some
neat uses for this. However, in the past I've had weird problems trying
to use disklabel to configure disks. Hopefully there isn't any interaction
if you use the raw partition vnd0c to access something you just want to
treat as a loopback file vice filesystem. I did notice that if you don't
supply the proper geometry for a drive while running vnconfig, the 
partition table is hosed (smaller than the size of the file, in 1M
chunks). Will this limit access to the end of a cdrom image built
using mkisofs? Guess I'll have to test it out.

> 
> Take care,
> 
> Bill
> 

Thanks for the explaination. Now at least i can tinker with a
little more intelligence.


-- 
Joseph Sarkes                   mailto:joe@mediaone.net