In message <20030206193415.N7389@snowdrop.l8s.co.uk>, David Laight writes:
>On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 01:50:34PM -0500, Steve Bellovin wrote:
>> Is there a convention for which NetBSD device should be used for on
>> mountable volumes that have only MSDOS file systems?  Currently, I have 
>> some that use 'e' but one that uses 'd'.  Should I just use disklabel 
>> to fix it?  More precisely, at least one of the devices (a USB widget) 
>> has no label, so the kernel is using 'e' -- should I just wipe the 
>> other "disk"?  dd if=/dev/zero?
>
>It depends whether the device is a 'hard disk' or a 'floppy'.

I miscounted; there are four:  one pcmcia hard disk, one pcmcia flash, 
and two USB flash disks.  I think those all count as hard disks, but..

>
>Hard disks have an bios partition table (the one you configure
>with fdisk) that supports 4 partitions.  Floppies only contain
>a single filesystem so don't contain that table.
>
>The netbsd kernel will 'magic up' a disklabel for hard disks
>that puts the bios partitions into netbsd partitions e, f, g and h.
>
>For floppies I think partition a is left referencing the entire disk.
>
>Note its is difficult to tell from the media whether it contains
>a bios partition table.
>
>LS120 'floppies' should contain one, but the drivers can also read
>standard floppies.
>
>
>
>	David
>
>-- 
>David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk
>


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
		http://www.wilyhacker.com (2nd edition of "Firewalls" book)