At 8:56 AM -0500 4/18/98, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
>On Sat, 18 Apr 1998, Michael G. Schabert wrote:
>
>> Hi guys, I have a coupla questions concerning multiple NetBSD partitions...
>> first off, if they're on the same physical drive, what's the point?
>
>It's a matter of personal taste, mostly. I've experimented with it both
>ways, and it doesn't seem to matter much, either way. I can think of a
>couple reasons to have a seperate root partition. 1) The mac68k booter
>only works with old-style 4.2BSD partitions. A seperate /usr can use the
>new 4.3 filesystem, after being made with newfs. Then you have a few more
>options for performance tuning. 2) If you do have two drives, setting
>aside a spare 20-40M root could save you a lot of trouble one day.

I know the virtues if you use 2 drives...my question was more concerning
why you'd want to partition a multi-gig drive, for instance, like I've read
of others doing. Personally, I had 2 BSD partitions on 1 drive because I
realized that I had way more swap than I needed (56 MB real RAM) & I cut
part of that out & made another partition out of the free space that
resulted & used that so that /home had more room.


>You mean the old "thunder and lightning" test, eh? :) Important point: you
>don't need to mount a partition to fsck it. You only do that with root,
>because the fsck executables are on root. If your /etc/fstab is set up
>correctly, with "2" in the last column for your non-root partitions, fsck
>will do the right thing with them, before they're mounted.

Hmm, here's my fstab...please see if you can spot any errors:
/dev/sd0a	/	ffs	rw 1 1
/dev/sd0g	/home	ffs	rw 1 2
/dev/sd0b	none	swap	sw 0 0
kern		/kern	kernfs	rw 0 0
proc		/proc	procfs	rw 0 0

Bob Nestor thinks that possibly binary/kernel synch could be part of the
problem. I'm about to switch which drive I use for NetBSD, so I'll be doing
a clean -current install fairly soon (weeks), which should help fix things
:).

Thanks everyone for your help & support,
Mike

Bikers don't *DO* taglines.