Phil Nelson writes
> >I am also thinking about a "format" utility a la SunOS, which would do away with "fdisk+disklabel" and all the assorted dodads one needs to create a disk.
> >Anyone care to comment Pro or Con
> 
> I've just been working on fdisk, and it shouldn't be a big problem to extend
> fdisk to do the right thing.  I'd like to see the mucking with the DOS disk
> partition table ripped out of disklabel and force the use of fdisk.  That
> appears to be cleaner to me.

The SunOS format command is a method of generally maintaining a hard drive. It
does everything from low level format through bad block re-assignement (SCSI) to
generating and updating partition tables without the need to a priori define an
entry in disktab.
I am somewhat under the impression that fdisk is a rather DOS centric concept
and is not a needful thing for any other port but for the 386. Forcing its
use might not be such a good idea. And of course, disklabel in its present
incarnation will only create a DOS partition table if one is not already defined.
But if you mean that there should be a single method of installing the boot
blocks, then I also agree with you, that functionality should be a separate
program as well.

Patrick