>>> How?  ccd AFAICT has no way to not begin at the beginning of its
>>> component partition, and - at least for those of us stuck with
>>> vendor boot ROMs on Suns (and this _is_ port-sparc) - partitions
>>> must begin on cylinder boundaries.
>> You are only stuck with that limitation on your boot disk.  And, I'm
>> pretty sure I've partition disks with SunOS format(8) such that
>> partitions don't fall on cylinder boundaries before ...
> It is possible, no problem.

Under what version of SunOS?  Every SunOS version I've seen uses disk
labels that record partition starting offsets in units of cylinders;
they don't even have a way to _represent_ a partition not starting on a
cylinder boundary.

> Partitions start at some block number and go X blocks.  One version
> of BlackHole (a sunos based firewall) had a bug in the install CD for
> 1.05Gb drives: the 'f' partition was wrong.  It overlapped.

Partitions can overlap while still beginning on cylinder boundaries.

> You can't do this with *format*, you see.  I mistyped while making
> the format.dat file :-)

I just looked at /etc/format.dat on a SunOS 4.1.3 machine.  I was
unable to find any spec for its format, but the numbers given for
partition descriptions certainly look as though the first number is in
different units from the second; the first number is small (a few
thousand at most) and the second is large (tens or hundreds of
thousands, often over a million).  Just like the numbers I see in
on-disk labels, oddly enough. :-)

And in my experience it is entirely possible to label a disk with
overlapping partitions using format(8).  I've done it often enough, and
I don't mean just c overlapping others.

					der Mouse

			    mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu