On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 07:44:57PM +0200, Vadim wrote:

> > > Part      Tag    Flag     Cylinders        Size            Blocks
> > >   0       root    wm     293 - 2118        3.13GB    (1826/0/0)  6557166
> > >   1       swap    wu       0 -  292      513.75MB    (293/0/0)   1052163
> >
> > Having swap start at cylinder 0 sure would've bitten you in the ass back
> > in the old days ... (overwriting the label/boot sectors while swapping)

> Hmmm.. sounds very weird - as far as I know, this problem was resolved years
> ago -
> all modern OSes should have protection both ALL kinds of partitions,
> including swap.
> In addition, I found that this subject was discussed in kernel devel.
> mailing-list at 1996!
> Is it possible that the protection hadn't been included in the CURRENT (1.6)
> kernel ???

NetBSD will protect the disklabel area of the disk until you run
`disklabel -W'.

Solaris protects the label in a different way -- it transparently
skips over the label area when creating file systems and using swap.
You're free to mangle the label area however you want.

I did it recently when I dd'd the sparc64 miniroot to the swap
partition, not realizing the Solaris install had put swap at the start
of the disk.

g.