While we are on the topic, a doubt I wanted to ask:  

When I first posted this query, somebody replied asking why I needed to
use so many partitions.  I have a 17 gig hard-disk, with abt 2 gigs kept
apart for NetBSD and OpenBSD.  The rest all is free.  

Should I just make a big partition out of it, or should I split it into
3-4 smaller partitions.  What is recommended ?  And why.

And since the initial disklabels had just 8 partitions allowed in it, is
it supposed to be taken that having lesser partitions is better (or they
didn't have such huge disks that time and so the decision ...) ?

Thanks for all the replies so far. :)

Rakhesh