Hello Neil!

In message <Pine.SOL.3.91.960815081819.27369D-100000@m5.physiol> you wrote:

> But kernel doesn't do the fsck. Fsck is run by the /etc/rc startup
> script.
> 
> You need to edit /etc/fstab.

Oh no! With a bit more thinking, I should have noticed that "checking
filesystems"=fsck=reading /etc/fstab.
But I was probably distracted by the much too familiar "sd0: no disklabel"
which shows up when the disklabel is gone and the root partition can't be
mounted (still happens to me occasionally and I can't figure out when).

Thanks a lot to all who pointed this out.

> (I used to thing that the SVR4 device syntax (eg /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 for
> controller 0, target 0, device 0, slice 0) was ugly and cumbersome. I
> start to see the attraction.)

So do I. This is really a bad thing in BSD Unix (and Linux too) that you have
to be so careful with the sequence of SCSI IDs. It's a bad way IMHO that the
linking between devices and device files is not locked but is rather done on
this "first come, first serve" basis, probably mixing everything up when the
hardware setup changes.
Look at my situation:
I can either edit my /etc/fstab every time before I connect the external
harddrive or disassemble my whole machine to change the internal drive's
ID to 0. I thought such nasty things were only necessary under DOS. :-(