Marinier, M. Claude, G. wrote:
> 
> I have not yot found a clear explanation of the relationship between
> installboot, disklabel, and newfs. If installboot installs to a partition,
> then newfs must be able to leave those sectors alone. Is this the case?
> While using disklabel, I have seen 'a' partitions which begin after the
> first sector. Should I be doing the same when I start with a fresh disk?

Now for a murky explanation: the idea is you label your disk using disklabel.
For each partition that you have defined in your label you run newfs which
takes the information in the label to create a filesystem in it. Then if you
want to make an ffs partition bootable, you run installboot on it.

Cheers,

Patrick