Re: boot disk has two MBR partitions

["Saifi Khan" <saifi.khan%fastpath.in@localhost>]

>  -------Original Message-------
>  From: Eric Schnoebelen <eric%cirr.com@localhost>
>  To: Saifi Khan <saifi.khan%fastpath.in@localhost>
>  Cc: netbsd-users%NetBSD.org@localhost
>  Subject: Re: boot disk has two MBR partitions
>  Sent: Feb 24 '13 00:17
>  
>  
>  "=?utf-8?Q?Saifi=20Khan?=" writes:
>  - Now, i have a boot disk (NetBSD terminology) of 320 GB (SATA II).
>  -
>  - Booted my laptop with 'boot.iso' (NetBSD-current) and using the
>  - 'NetBSD' fdisk utility, i created two MBR partitions (NetBSD
>  - terminology) of the following size:
>  -
>  -  partition no 1: 20 GB   (base system, src)
>  -  partition no 2: 300 GB (pkgsrc, other sources, mails etc.)
>  -
>  - i intend to setup 'ffs' on both the MBR partitions.
>  -
>  - in the linux world, the disk would typically be '/dev/sda' and the
>  - two profound partitions would be
>  -
>  -  /dev/sda1
>  -  /dev/sda2
>  -
>  - in the NetBSD scheme of things, the first disk is seen as 'wd0'.
>  - In that case, how would the two 'MBR partitions' be addressed as?
>  
>  NetBSD doesn't use MBR partitions to define individual
>  filesystems.  In NetBSD (and nearly every other UNIX-like
>  operating system on the x86 besides Linux) uses one MBR
>  partition to contain all of its filesystems.
>  
>  So, for the above partitioning scheme, you want a single NetBSD
>  partion of 320Gb, and then two BSD partitions (or slices)
>  defined using disklabel(8).  More than likely they will be wd0a and
>  wd0e once you've completed labeling.
>  

Hi Eric:

Thanks for your reply.

If there are two MBR partitions on a 320 GB hard disk of size 20GB and 300GB, 
there has to be a way to label/name them as well.

Consider, this scenario - the 300GB MBR partition has some other OS (may be 
Windows or Linux). In that case one would need to mount the fs on the second 
MBR partition to access the files. How does one do it ?

In my case, the second MBR partition just happens to be formatted with 'ffs' 
instead of 'ntfs' or 'ext2fs'. i should be able to mount it right ?

thanks
Saifi.