Date:        Fri, 28 Dec 2001 20:25:51 +0100
    From:        Julio Merino <juli@merino.net>
    Message-ID:  <20011228202551.C728@klamath.local>


  | PD: I still think that NetBSD naming scheme is not as powerful as the
  | FreeBSD one...

No, the NetBSD scheme is more powerful than FreeBSD's.  But like many
things with more power, it is also harder to use.

To see the more power - imagine you have a desire to have a partition
that spans two "slices" for whatever reason.   Easy in NetBSD, impossible
in FreeBSD.   On the other hand, there's nothing that the FreeBSD scheme
can label that the NetBSD scheme can't also label.

The principle of the NetBSD scheme is that there is exactly one label
that matters, and it describes how the drive is divided up.   Other labels
that might exist on the drive have (or should have) nothing at all to do
with NetBSD - they're for some other OS to use (though tools like mbrlabel
can make extracting info from them, and including it into the NetBSD
label, a little easier).

The other problem you had - mbrlabel scribbling on FreeBSD's label indicates
some major fault with your installation.  NetBSD shouldn't be noticing the
FreeBSD label at all - it should simply be being ignored.   (On the other
hand FreeBSD notices and uses NetBSD labels - or did last time I tried - it
needs to because of its "labels restricted to slices" philosophy).

Most likely you don't have the NetBSD "slice" correctly labelled as being
NetBSD in the MBR label - or you have the FreeBSD slice incorrectly labelled
as being NetBSD.   That is, you should have one MBR type that is 165, and
one that is 169 in the setup you have described (165 for FreeBSD, 169 for
NetBSD).

kre