On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, David Laight wrote:

> Starting the fs anywhere other than 8k is a PITA - you need to be VERY
> careful to ensure that any old superblock (eg from an FFSv1 fs) is
> overwritten.  Otherwise mount and/or fsck WILL treat the disk as FFSv1
> with the expected consequences for your data.

A good rule of thumb for any situation where a filesystem format is changing
is to zero out the first 64 blocks of the partition with `dd'.

With all the times I've hit a fs "oops" situation, I find that rule so
useful that it might be worthwhile to make it part of sysinst when a
partition is marked for newfs'ing.  8-)

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com>