Subject: root partition must be first on disk ?
To: None <port-sparc@NetBSD.ORG>
From: None <Juergen.Fluk@lrz.tu-muenchen.de>
List: port-sparc
Date: 05/21/1996 11:36:18
I had running netbsd-1.0 on my SLC, and recently upgraded to 1.1.
I have both netbsd and SunOS 4.1.2 installed on the same (1GB) disk.

As at least the generic kernel coming with the binary distribution
only allows sd?a to be the root partition I just renamed my original
SunOS sd?a to sd?d (with a new kernel) and took the old sd?d partition
for netbsd sd?a. So on the disk I had
	sd?d	netbsd
	sd?b	swap
	sd?a	sunos /
	sd?g	sunos /usr
	...

With this setup netbsd has problems with swapping, the kernel says
	... swap_pager_clean: clean of page NNN failed
but doesn't crash nor corrupt data.
And the sunos / partition cannot be fsck'd, fsck tells
	CANNOT WRITE block 16
for setting the file system state, so I had to mount it readonly.

Last weekend I realized that both problems may be related to the
partition position on the disk, so I swapped netbsd and sunos
physically and ... no more problems!

Is this a known problem ?

louis