C Partition

[John Gilmore]

In article <1579 at brl-tgr.ARPA>, cottrell at nbs-vms.ARPA (COTTRELL, JAMES) writes:
> > >About that c partition... c accesses the whole disk including 
> > >the space reserved bad blocks. 
> > Wizards:  Is this really true?
> Yes.
>                      When you make your file system partition C, give it
> less blox. Sutract off that last track. Change the `pc' parameter in
> /etc/disktab from 500384 to 499776. I see no reason to include the last
> track in the C partition description. SUN 2.0 doesn't. 

Sun Unix has never included the bad block area in the partitions.
That sounds like a suicidal idea to me.  Then again, Sun Unix puts
a *label* on the disk which identifies where the partitions are, rather
than having random numbers hard-coded into the disk drivers and assorted
files in /etc.  Users can hack this label with a standalone program
(or indeed from Unix, using the raw device).  When the system boots
(or mounts the disk), it reads the label to figure out where the
partitions are, and there's an ioctl to pass the info back to things
like newfs or mkfs or fsck.  Given that this setup is totally different
from what you find on Vaxen (at least in 4.2), what Sun Unix does or
does not do is not really relevant to how you build tables for Vaxen.