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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!uunet!decwrl!amdcad!BitBlocks.com!bvs From: bvs@BitBlocks.com (Bakul Shah) Subject: Re: Disklabel help needed Message-ID: <C3uEzo.1J0@BitBlocks.com> Organization: Bit Blocks, Inc. References: <C3J9FL.4vJ@BitBlocks.com> <C3KKLq.1vH@sugar.neosoft.com> <C3Lyuz.A4y@BitBlocks.com> <C3MwC4.ALy@sugar.neosoft.com> Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1993 19:47:47 GMT Lines: 25 peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva) writes: >The other part of my comment was that it would be desirable to make this >a standard part of the system installation, so tools that want to play >with the bootstrap can have a fixed, known partition to work with rather >than having to know that wd0a or wd0b or whatever is first. I'd rather be able to boot from *any* partition so that I can boot even if one copy is trashed. All that is required is to leave a few sectors at the beginning of each partition alone (and change swap code for that). The other problem with a separate boot partition is that Unix tools like to have cylinder aligned partitions and making a 1 sector `cylinder' for scsi disks (as you suggested in another post) will break a few other things. There is one more reason why I hate the idea of a separate partition for boot. I just *know* someone will write a Megabyte sized boot program. What is desirable is to fix disklabel and get disklabel + boot programs in sync. Disklabel is hard to use and does not deal with non Unix partitions well. Bakul Shah <bvs@BitBlocks.com>