5.1-RELEASE: disklabel/bsdlabel for multi-boot system

[Meow Cat]

Hi,
   Before starting, I should say that I've RTFM'd, looked 
in
the FAQ and the mailing lists, etc. I've seen lots of 
people
complaining about similar problems but no answers.
   I have an existing partition table, and I'd like 
FreeBSD
to fit into it with as little damage to the existing OSs 
as
possible. The setup I have (as reported by OpenBSD 
disklabel)
is:

   a:   262144   257040    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16
   b:    16384   519184      swap                     
   c:   498015   257040    unused        0     0      
   d:   219487   535568    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16
   e:  4000122  6747363    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16
   i:   256977       63    ext2fs                     
   l:  5992245   755055     MSDOS                     
   m: 45351432 10747548     MSDOS                     
   n: 32001417 56099043     MSDOS                     
   o: 32001417 88100523     MSDOS                     

It took me ages to figure out how to achieve this under
OpenBSD, and then after install I couldn't get X to work.
So I'm trying FreeBSD - of course bsdlabel only supports
slices a-h for some reason that is never explained, so I
have to delete half of the slices. Fine, I do that.
So with a heavily edited label file I try:
bsdlabel -R /dev/ad2s0 bsdlabel_file

Every slice starts "after end of unit" and "extends beyond
end of unit." The c slice "doesn't cover entire unit!"

Okay, I can deal with that, I think - just extend the c
slice to cover the entire disk, use "bsdlabel -A" (after a
"bsdlabel -w") to read the disk configuration and edit it
to ensure that it's not broken, and try again.

I get the same errors. How can the first slice possibly
begin "after end of unit" and what do I do to fix this?
How are these "unit"-related numbers calculated? Does
"unit"===entire-hard-disk? Why does this fail even when
I make the c slice cover the entire hard disk?

Also, I'd like to have the a slice to be a small one
from the main partition table, and /usr mounted on a
larger slice within the extended partition table. I
managed this under OpenBSD with the table above - is
there a problem (other than the one I mentioned) with
using this type of table in FreeBSD?

Finally, before you tell me to try sysinstall - I tried
it. I'm sure it has its uses, but the interactive fdisk
part is unable to understand extended partitions, and
the interactive disklabel does not allow you to specify
your own begin/end for slices, either in sectors, or in
cyl/trk/head. So it's useless for my purposes. The only
possible use I can see for it is for people who want to
devote their entire machine to FreeBSD. That's something
I noticed in OpenBSD also - both OSs seem about 10 years
behind when it comes to supporting mutli-boot systems :(

Anyway, any help would be appreciated...
 
 
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