Frederick Bruckman writes:
 > Right. Consider the case where you have several extended partitions, all
 > MSDOS, but no NetBSD partition. The kernel can't tell from the MBR where
 > the extended partition are, and you can't easily tell it, because
 > there's nowhere to write the label. I thought you said you actually did
 > what Todd suggested may be possible -- created a disktab entry, and used
 > that to mount partitions. It would be great if you could.

You are probably right. But I don't know the details of the MBR layout
so I can not really comment on these matters. It just seems to me that
if it is possible for Windows to figure out which partitions are
primary and extended then it surely must also be possible for NetBSD?
 > 
 > What I don't understand are the -N and -W flags. It seems like you ought
 > to be able to update the in-core label without touching the disk via -N,
 > but I'd be surprised if that really worked.

As I understand the man pages the -NW are for disallowing/allowing writing
an optional 16-byte disk pack label (the packid). It has nothing to do
with the partitioning of the disk but is more a sort of descriptive
item. Of course I could be wrong!

Kind regards
   Ib-Michael
-- 
email at home: imm@nethotel.dk
email at work: imm@dmdata.dk
Running NetBSD/i386 v1.5.2