from Manuel Bouyer:

> See the mbrlabel program. There has been discussions about this in tech-kern,
> and if I remember rigth the conclusion was that we don't want to put that
> much knowledge in the kernel ...

You mean it's better to render a hard disk nonbootable and render a DOS 
partition nonbootable, and risk overwriting less-easily-rescuable data when the
hard disk is shared with DOS or Windows, and Linux?  I suppose that would not be
a concern for BSD servers, where BSD is installed to the whole hard disk and
there is no need to partition to share with any other OS.  But I am led to
believe NetBSD is not really compatible with Linux and DOS on the same hard
disk.