Bad label on hard drives

[Stuart Levy]

Something to watch for if you're losing disk labels -- or, better, when
you're partitioning disks:

    * DON'T HAVE A SWAP PARTITION BEGINNING AT CYLINDER 0 OF ANY DISK! *

We found this by bitter experience.  The disk label is sector 0 of
cylinder 0.  Filesystems carefully avoid messing with sector 0 of their
first cylinder, but swap partitions use all the space they're given and
happily erase sector 0.  If you've no other use for the space, just start
the swap area (typically partition "b") at cylinder 1.

    Stuart Levy, Geometry Group, University of Minnesota
    slevy at geom.umn.edu