SunOS 4.x boot disk layout

NetBSD actually doesn't care what the partition table says in the c partition; the drivers simply ignore the partition table when accessing the c partition. I suspect Sun did the same thing, but I wasn't quite sure enough to come right out and say so. The only odd thing, to me, is why it's the third of eight partitions that's the whole-disk partition. Compatability, that's about it. You could define RAW_PART to 7 in NetBSD and build yourself a system on which partition h is the whole disk and partition c is a perfectly vanilla partition. (You could set RAW_PART to 0 and get partition a as the whole-disk partition, even, but given the way the ROM bootcode defaults to using the a partition Having RAW_PART at all is a rather ugly kludge. The sane way to do it is to have separate devices for the whole disk and for the partitions, somewhat akin to the wedges that have been talked about (in NetBSD - I think one of the other BSDs already has something of the sort). But back when partitioning was first invented, I doubt anyone thought much about that, and now we're stuck with legacies. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B