Hi Leslie,

> From: netbsd-help-owner@NetBSD.org On Behalf Of polzer02@stud.uni-passau.de
> 
> Hm, I don't think I can already understand these disklabel issues.
> 
> For the theoretical part: what kind of advantages does this separation
> between real partitions and the BSD disklabel organization offer?

The fdisk and disklabel function duplicate each other in that they both
describe how to divide up and share a disk drive.

The disklabel concept is from BSD Unix and is used on *all* NetBSD ports.
It's portable across every NetBSD port.  It's widely used in the rest of
the Unix world.

The fdisk concept is from Microsoft DOS on Intel platforms and is used on
*some* but not all NetBSD ports.

The fdisk is on i386 and *some* ports because it's the language Microsoft
operating systems understand and needs to be there to interoperate with
Microsoft.

> For the practical part: why did you choose these offsets?
> I don't get it...

I'm suggesting you create disklabel entries that map your 2 FAT & 1 Linux
fdisk partitions into NetBSD disklabel slices.

An offset and size number pair describe a disk slice i.e. partition.
The offsets and sizes are 1 for 1 values taken from the fdisk output.

> Many thanks for the information so far!
> Maybe stuff like this should be included in the NetBSD guide?

I'm not on the NetBSD developer team so I can't assess the effort needed.
It's useful information but only to a very small population and for a very
limited time period.

> Leslie

Conrad