On Fri, 6 Mar 1998, der Mouse wrote:

>> I'm wondering if I have my swap space set up properly (and the main
>> partition for that matter), the reason being, I could still boot from
>> the installation filesystem leftover on the swap partition even
>> several days after the installation.  This seems to indicate that it
>> is not using the swap partition as it surely would have been
>> overwritten.
>
> This seems like a reasonable inference, but it's not certain; it could
> have swapped over fragments of the filesystem that didn't happen to hit
> anything critical for booting.  I believe swap is *allocated* starting
> at the beginning of the partition, but it is not necessarily *used*
> starting from there.
>
>> Also, I've done "continue" from the "db >" prompt after a trap and it
>> dumps all over my root partition and scrambles the boot kernel
>> necessitating a complete reinstall.
>
> This sounds very much as though your swap overlays something more
> important - which *could* also explain some of your other problems.
>
>> My partitioning is set up with a 32 meg swap from 1st cyl to (+32
>> megs), then the rest is my main partition from block (+32megs + next
>> cyl boundary) to the end.  (I don't have the exact parameters handy)
>
>> Should the swap be at the begining or end of the physical disk or
>> does it matter?
>
> I don't think it matters much, with an even vaguely recent system.
> There was a time when your a partition had to begin at the beginning of
> your disk or everything before it would be effectively read-only, but
> that was quite a while ago, and if you're not getting "clean of page
> xxxxx failed" messages, that's not your problem anyway.
>
>Could you send (either to me or to the list) your /etc/fstab and what
>disklabel reports for your disk partitioning?

Here goes:

liz# cat fstab
/dev/sd0a / ffs rw 1 1
/dev/sd0b none swap sw 0 0


edlabel>         type_num: 4
        sub_type: 0
       type_name: SCSI disk
       pack_name: fictitious
    bytes/sector: 512
   sectors/track: 82
 tracks/cylinder: 8
       cylinders: 3117
sectors/cylinder: 656
partition      start         (c/t/s)      nblks         (c/t/s)  type

 a (root)     179744     (274/00/00)    1865008    (2843/00/00)  4.2BSD
 b (swap)        656       (1/00/00)     179743     (273/07/81)* swap
 c (disk)          0       (0/00/00)    2044752    (3117/00/00)  unknown
 d (user)          0       (0/00/00)          0       (0/00/00)  unused
 e (user)          0       (0/00/00)          0       (0/00/00)  unused
 f (user)          0       (0/00/00)          0       (0/00/00)  unused
 g (user)          0       (0/00/00)          0       (0/00/00)  unused
 h (user)          0       (0/00/00)          0       (0/00/00)  unused