| From rhialto@polder.ubc.kun.nl Sun May 16 16:39:52 1999

| On Sun, 16 May 1999, Paul Goyette wrote:
| 
| > You won't be able to do much with the other partitions until the
| > partition type is set to something recognizable (165 or 169) by fdisk.
| 
| Eh? I've always been able to use disks that were never touched by fdisk
| at all. As long as they were not the boot disk (on i386).
| 
| My problems were, and they may be applicable here too, is to write the
| very first disklabel to the disk. Often, only the in-core disklabel would
| be edited, but it would not be written to disk. To do that, I write the
| desired disklabel in text form (from disklabel -e sd1) to a file, say
| /tmp/label, then something like disklabel -R sd1 /tmp/label to write it.

In order to be sure I have a backup copy of the label (/etc/disklabels
has been around for sometime and is a great reminder and life-saver 8-)
I usually nab a label from another disk then edit it and write it via e.g.
"disklabel -R -r sd1 /etc/disklabels/sd1."  I then confirm a pull-up of
to in-kernel copy via "disklabel sd1" or whatever. In this case, I think
I just used the "fictitious" label and cloned the "c" partition entry (with
"unused" for the fstype) for my other partitions.  Silly me!  -- Ken