> 	'a' was made the root partition because it sat at the start of the
> 	disk and the filesystem code knew to look past the disklabel
> 	somehow.  Swap was NEVER put on 'a' because the swap code did NOT
> 	know how to look past the disklabel (these are semantics which, I
> 	presume, have been superceded by smarts in the driver which know
> 	where the disklabel starts).  Either that or the boot code didn't
> 	know how to look past fs block 0 for some silly reason...

I'd s/disklabel/boot block/g in the above paragraph...

					- Bill