On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 03:26:08PM +1000, leon zadorin wrote: > That's all I am saying. Feel free to ignore or make "blah blah blah" noises > :-) > > So now we can, perhaps, get back (if at all) to the man pages and what > they are implying wrt original question. > > Leon.
I'm just back from vacation, so I'm late to jump in. The answer krw@ has given is right. We (and as a consequence the kernel) take the liberty to change fields in disklabel, especially the entry for the 'c' partition. Furthermore, there are partition specific entries used by fsck_ffs to locate the alternate superblocks. These entries are NOT maintained for the 'c' partition. You might want to check the source of fsck_ffs. It contains code to locate alternate superblocks, and that code will not work for the 'c' partition. As for the slighly off-topic part of the thread: if we write a guideline into our manual page, it has a good reason to be there. Consider the man page to be your much needed authorative source of information. -Otto