In message <199910130129.DAA05501@sean.ebone.net>, Sean Doran writes:
>Invent?

I'm not aware of other systems that require you to have two partitions
dedicated to reflecting "the whole disk" in different ways...

>Well, I am spindle-rich and would like to spread
>tasks among spindles (and controllers) because I can make
>various tasks fly better that way.

I would too, for my desktop.  For my laptop, I want to be able to create
partition maps that would let me, for instance, have a 1GB ext2fs partition
which has a linux install, and mount it under NetBSD as /linux, and I'd
like to have a handful of other partitions, and I want to keep the various
functions of the machine a little separated just for luck.

This has saved me in the past; I had a disk go bad on my BSDI desktop, and
I was able to get about 95% of the data, some of it with no hassle at all,
because it was adequately partitioned.  ;-)

-s