On Sun, 2 Dec 2001, Andy Ball wrote:

> Anyhow, it's about time I learned to properly plan my
> disklabel (especially since I can't find the old 'auto
> defaults for all' option ;-)

"Standard", or "Standard with X" in sysinst, instead of "Custom"...

> I have a vague recollection that the root partition has to be within
> 1024 cylinders.

Your root partition has to be readable by the bootloader, which uses BIOS
routines, otherwise it won't be able to load the kernel. I suppose if you
can guarantee that the kernel will be in that range, the partition could
still be bigger, but I wouldn't recommend that.

The actual limit depends on the BIOS.. on newer BIOSes, I think you can
have it anywhere within the first 8 gigabytes.

> Does the swap partition also have to be?

No.

> Can I use the remainder of the disk for the /usr partition?  How does
> this look...
>                                     *The DOS partition
> Start    End   Size    Mb  Use       would start at
> ~~~~  ~~~~~  ~~~~~  ~~~~  ~~~~~~    sector 63 to leave
>     0*   403    404   208  MS-DOS    room for the boot
>   404    893    490   253  /         track.
>   894   1023    130    67  swap
>  1024   3302   2279  1176  /usr                     ...?

Looks fairly sane. / is arguably a little big, but if you're planning on
putting a lot in /var, that might not be such a bad thing.

> Oh, and I have a vague idea that...
>
>   a: should be /,
>   b: should be swap,
>   c: is the NetBSD part of the disk,
>   d: is the whole disk.

That's right, at least for the i386 port.

c and d are fixed, but a and b *could* be used for anything. But it is
conventional to use them for / and swap respectively.

> Should I use e: for /usr and f: for the MS-DOS partition?

Yes.

-- 
Gillette - the best a man can forget