Robert Kennedy writes:
> 
> > mount -t msdos /dev/whatever_disk_and_partition /mnt
> > 
> > Should mount it.  however, the whatever_disk_and_partition argument must be
> > the MSDOS partition described on the NetBSD disklabel on that hard disk.
> > What this means is that you need to disklabel that hard drive.  This is
> > pretty dangerous because you could potentially write over the MSDOS
> > partition information, and make it unusable to MSDOS w/o a reformat.
> 
> You need not write the disklabel to the drive. You can disklabel the
> drive and in the process set only the kernel's "in-memory" copy of the
> label for the disk. This is not (as) dangerous.

<grin>  yeah, I know that can be done, but unfortunately, the last time I
tried to update the in-core version only, I ended up trashing the disk.  :(

At any rate, I use dd(1) to make a backup of the beginning of the DOS disk
before playing with it:

dd if=/dev/wd0d of=backup.wd0 count=50 (or something like that)

Mark