On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 01:50:34PM -0500, Steve Bellovin wrote:
> Is there a convention for which NetBSD device should be used for on
> mountable volumes that have only MSDOS file systems?  Currently, I have 
> some that use 'e' but one that uses 'd'.  Should I just use disklabel 
> to fix it?  More precisely, at least one of the devices (a USB widget) 
> has no label, so the kernel is using 'e' -- should I just wipe the 
> other "disk"?  dd if=/dev/zero?

It depends whether the device is a 'hard disk' or a 'floppy'.

Hard disks have an bios partition table (the one you configure
with fdisk) that supports 4 partitions.  Floppies only contain
a single filesystem so don't contain that table.

The netbsd kernel will 'magic up' a disklabel for hard disks
that puts the bios partitions into netbsd partitions e, f, g and h.

For floppies I think partition a is left referencing the entire disk.

Note its is difficult to tell from the media whether it contains
a bios partition table.

LS120 'floppies' should contain one, but the drivers can also read
standard floppies.



	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk