On Sat, Jun 02, 2007 at 04:37:58PM -0000, Andrew Ball wrote:
> 
> Hello David,
> 
>    DL> Neither (well not usually) the filesystem will reserve the
>      > first 8k for the bootcode, and the disklabel sits inside that
>      > area.
> 
> If the filesystem sets aside the first 8K, does that mean that I can
> start a partition at sector 0 and the disklabel lives inside the file-
> system?

Yes, you can start a filesystem in sector zero.

> I'm thinking of doing this with data disks, so bootability is a non-
> issue.  Would a disk that's just labelled (with no fdisk/BIOS
> partition) be portable between NetBSD machines of different
> architectures?  If I write them on a PC, are they only readable on
> other little-endian machines?

That is an entirely different question....

The kernel has code for accessing filesystems byte-swapped.
But there is no code for reading byte-swapped netbsd labels.

If you need more than one filesystem you might actually be better of
using fdisk, putting a single filesystem in each mbr partition and
relying on the code that supports USB sticks (etc) to be able to
find the partitions! If the kernel doesn't do it automatically (some do)
then use mbrlabel.

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk