On Fri Dec 10 1999 at 17:40:38 +1100, matthew green wrote:

> hmm.. i seemed to notice that your sd0b started at the start of
> the disk?  this is where the disklabel resides and unless you
> specifically enable writing to that area with disklabel -W sd0
> you'll get ro- failures like you're seeing.
> 
> but, overwriting this area will mean you'll blow away your disk
> label ...
> 
> i'd suggest chaning sd0b to skip a few sectors at the start of
> the disk (at least 8K).

Sorry for asking the following basic questions, but I want to clear this
for myself once and for all.

Is a normal partition (eg. ffs) allowed to start from sector 0? I have
many disks with partitions like these at the moment and they seem to
work just fine. (I hope not by sheer luck.. ;) I know that I can't do
that on i386 if I want to have a bootable partition, but it seems to
work on eg. alpha just fine. What about sparc? Installboot man page
tells that the first-stage bootprogram is written into the superblock,
so I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work. How does the superblock
and the disklabel mix?

The install document tells me to put partition boundaries at cylinder
boundaries for SunOS filesystem compatibility. This is only a filesystem
thingie, ie. I can begin the swap partition wherever I want, right or
wrong?

-- 
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 Antti Kantee   /       NetBSD        \  1973 <- draken   \    / o
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