Soren S. Jorvang wrote: 
|  SGI's have a 16-partition disklabel rather similar to the BSD one.
|  Since it is necessary to use that rather than a native BSD disklabel
|  if you want to boot from the disk, we can't just ignore it.

If you want to move disks back and forth to irix, you can't swap part 10; the
knowledge is hardwired in too many places in irix.  If you don't care about
that, then you can do it with no issues.

The only partition that is actually hardwired in the PROM is 8 (and in
theory, even that isn't hardwired; in practice there are some assumptions
about it, even in the PROM).

The rest (other than 10 as the whole drive, mostly by fx as far as
standalone goes, which won't matter to the mips port) are just
convention.  If you don't use the SGI sash as the loader, you don't
need anything at all, other than to leave block 0 alone with the
minimal data structure at the start of the block, and a "bogus" size
that is at least the start address of the secondary loader plus it's size
to pass the validity check.


Dave Olson
Personal:  olson@bengaltech.com        Work:  olson@geocast.com
           http://www.bengaltech.com          http://www.geocast.com