> Well this explains a lot.  I was working under the assumption that the 
> device partition assignment followed the same logical order as the device 
> assignment.  This clears up a bit of advice Colin Wood gave me a while 
> back when I was trying to mount my cdrom drive.  He advised me to mount 
> /dev/cd0c.  I looked in /dev, saw there was a cd0a, and mounted that one 
> instead.  Seems to work, but I think I will try cd0c and see what happens.

Since the cd-rom disklabeler AFAIK puts the whole thing into one partition,
there's no difference on cd's.

I don't know where this tradition started, but it was present in at least
BSD 4.3, and probably earlier. I think it started as, we need a root and
some swap. Doh, now we need to get at the whole disk.

Tradition is on BSD disklabels that partitions d, e, f, g, and h share
space. I think typically d, e, and f share the space taken by g.

That bit me once when I tried to fsck rz1g on an ULTRIX box when the
real partitions were rz1d and rz1e. Never sysadmin before you're had
your morning coffee.

Take care,

Bill