Hi Jonathan,
I finally found a satisfactory answer from the sources. See below.
Jonathan Schleifer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> c is always the whole disk and because the
> disk has no disklabel and no partition table, it's also a.
Well, the floppy _does_ have a disklabel. By default, it only has
partition "c". The disklabel is thus simply empty.
> It's the same like with
> CD-ROMs. You can access them also as cd0a and cd0c.
But cd-roms have a disklabel with "c" and "a" - please do a
"disklabel cd0" with a CD inserted! So it still seems strange
to me that you can mount partition "a" where there is no
partition "a" and you can't do a "newfs fd0a"...
> I don't see any sense for a partition table and / or disklabel on a
> floppy disk.
But why would there be the floppy types in /etc/disktab?
As mentioned before the floppy3 type creates partition a
and partition b.
Even more interestingly, I found an answer that satisfies me:
The OpenBSD developers' preferred way can be seen in the
Makefile for the creation of the distribution boot-floppy images:
from /usr/src/distrib/i386/common/Makefile.inc :
========================
VND?= svnd0
VND_DEV= /dev/${VND}a
VND_RDEV= /dev/r${VND}a
VND_CRDEV= /dev/r${VND}c
FLOPPYSIZE?= 144
FLOPPYTYPE?= floppy3
...
${FS}: bsd.gz
...
disklabel -w -r ${VND} ${FLOPPYTYPE}
newfs -m 0 -o space -i 524288 -c 80 ${VND_RDEV}
========================
So the short answer is:
$ disklabel -w fd0 floppy
$ newfs fd0a
$ mount /dev/fd0a /mnt
Thanks to all for your replies!
Michael
