On Sat, 18 Apr 1998, Michael G. Schabert wrote:

> Hi guys, I have a coupla questions concerning multiple NetBSD partitions...
> first off, if they're on the same physical drive, what's the point?

It's a matter of personal taste, mostly. I've experimented with it both
ways, and it doesn't seem to matter much, either way. I can think of a
couple reasons to have a seperate root partition. 1) The mac68k booter
only works with old-style 4.2BSD partitions. A seperate /usr can use the
new 4.3 filesystem, after being made with newfs. Then you have a few more
options for performance tuning. 2) If you do have two drives, setting
aside a spare 20-40M root could save you a lot of trouble one day. 

> Now, after all that drivel, a question would be: Why does rc mount non-root
> partitions AFTER running fsck?? Because of this, anytime I reboot by
> "nonconventional" means, I must manually go into single-user mode to fsck
> the partition, since in rc it'll complain that it's not clean. But rc takes
> care of doing that to the root partition on its own. It would seem to me
> that if it mounted the automount partitions first, then it could do its
> parallel fscking (assuming partitions on separate physical drives).

You mean the old "thunder and lightning" test, eh? :) Important point: you
don't need to mount a partition to fsck it. You only do that with root,
because the fsck executables are on root. If your /etc/fstab is set up
correctly, with "2" in the last column for your non-root partitions, fsck
will do the right thing with them, before they're mounted.