Perry Metzger writes:

>Oh, THAT.

> You have to fuck the machine pretty
>badly to have that happen -- or try to label a disk you haven't used
>fdisk on first!

Uh, that turns out not to be the case, either :)

The only thing to which the appelation `fucked' applies is the
NetBSD/i386 disklabel in 1.2.  Or, possibly afterward, the person who
used it :).

I tried to install onto an MBR partition that used to hold a bootable
Linux filesystem, where i'd just changed the MBR type to 386BSD with
the Linux fdisk.  That lost, *every time*, even though the MBR was
fine beforehand (tested by rebooting after changing the partition type.)

I haven't yet risked installing -current (with the new bootblocks) on
a Linux machine.  I got into the habit of installing by dd'ing an
existing NetBSD disklabel onto the target partition, and editing it.
Editing the faked-up label probably works just as well, provided you
manage to write the damn thing to disk.

I'll talk about this more via private e-mail, if I find another disk I
can bear to blow away, or spend a day recovering, on which to
duplicate the problem.  If nothing else, the faked-up disklabel in
12.C probably fixes everything but irrecoverable pilot error.