Why is 'disklabel'ng a new drive so difficult?

[RW]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2007 17:19:12 -0400
Jerry McAllister <jerrymc at msu.edu> wrote:

> Then, the only thing wrong is that your offsets should start at 0.
> They mean within the slice, not raw disk sector 0.

I was just looking at the bsdlable manpage, and it says:

"For partition `c', * will be interpreted as an offset of 0.  The first
partition should start at offset 16, because the first 16 sectors are
reserved for metadata."

I normally use sysintall for new slices, but a few days ago I edited an
old slice to turn the old root, swap, /tmp and /var partitions into a
single partition d for a squid cache, and I ended-up with this:

$ bsdlabel /dev/ad0s2
# /dev/ad0s2:
8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
  c: 141853950        0    unused        0     0         #  ...
  d:  5242880        0    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552
  f: 16777216  5242880    4.2BSD        0     0     0
  g: 119833854 22020096    4.2BSD        0     0     0



I'm wondering if I should put in an offset of 16 for the d partition