On 14 Jan 1997, Olaf Seibert wrote:

> In <199701132112.NAA02468@lestat.nas.nasa.gov> Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov> writes:
> >... this is the wonderful inconsistency in the i386 port... (*sigh*)
> >
> >RAW_PART (`d' on the i386) is the whole disk.  `c' is the NetBSD portion
> >of the disk.  The disklabel resides in the NetBSD portion of the disk.
> 
> I wonder how difficult it would be to make a list of which programs
> or system functions use either the c or d partition. On many systems
> c and d would be identical, and a waste of one precious partition.
> It would be nice to know what pitfalls to expect when you only have
> the c (or only d) partition defined as "whole disk".

??

On all other ports (AFAIK), partition c is the whole disk, and partition d
is nothing special.

Everything seems to work fine.

I think the real reason for this situation is that NetBSD/i386 does its
partitioning within one DOS partition, where as other ports, like mac68k,
have each NetBSD partition be a partition in the native OS's partitioning
table (or they use UNIX partitioning to begin with).

Take care,

Bill