> 
> On my FreeBSD-machine I did a kind of novel thing. The b (swap) partition
> is physically located _before_ the a partition (which is the rest of the
> disk) so that the swap partition is kept on the fastest part of the IDE
> disk. If I understand Ragge correctly this doesn't work on NetBSD-vax
> though. (But since older disks doesn't have different zones it doesn't
> matter much anyway.)
> 
Well, it works if you put the swap at the end of the disk :-)
All of this is because the boot blocks go out and search for a file
named "boot" in a filesystem that starts at physical sector zero on 
the disk it booted from.

-- Ragge