[ access non-bsd partitions from bsd ]

> > > Might I suggest that
> > > this is is one of those things that would be real nice to see changed so
> > > you don't need to mess around (on PC's)...
> > 
> > Thats on the "To Do" list, yes. Help is of course solicited in
> > implementation!
> 
> Well, I'm not at all familiar with that part of the kernel

What's being proposed here ?  I see two possible options for this:

a) Teach the kernel to understand the FDISK partitions and make them
   available under a different set of minor numbers

b) Write a userland program that parses FDISK partitions and generates
   BSD partition records out of them (and probably vice versa :-)

Only (a) requires kernel familiarity, but I would hope the netbsd
community to oppose this one strongly on the grounds of not
bloating the kernel where userland work would do as well.

Thinking about it, ISTM that the "right way" to do this is just to
extend the netbsd "fdisk" program to prompt for bsd partitions, create
disklabel protofile (and the bsd fdisk partition, if necessary), then
call disklabel -R on it.  This then would be a convenient way of
labelling a bsd disc where coexistence with other FDISK partitions was
desired.  This would also solve the problem on some machines where
using different sets of virtual geometries with the two different
partitioning regimes can cause the machine not to boot -- fdisk would
generate a bsd partition table with the same virtual geometry as the
FDISK one.

(ps: usage: fdisk refers to /sbin/fdisk and FDISK refers to the DOS/BIOS
recognised partition table :-)
-- 
Ronald Khoo <ronald@demon.net> Voice: +44 181 371 1000 Fax: +44 181 371 1150