On Mon, 26 Jul 2010, frantisek holop wrote:

quoted text
> since my first email, i see what i did wrong...
> that was the point of writing to the mail list
> in the first place, to see if i was doing something
> silly.  turns out i was.  does that warrant abuse?
> of course it does, i am not new here.
>
>
> i also see, that now this problem became simply
> a "should we babysit root" issue, and i dont
> want root to be babysit either.
>
> but regardless of that, i think leaving old garbage
> after newfs-ing a partition is not a good idea in
> any case and it's one of those things i wouldn't
> except either.  my mistake again.

Finish your homework first.

quoted text
>> If ffs had overwritten the beginning of the partition you would have
>> ended with a *different* error message and the kernel would not have
>>
>> => Your homework is to figure out what the other error message would be
>>    and why.
>
> it would be the same error message ffs gives when given
> a non-ffs partition:
>
> mount_msdos: /dev/sd1a on /mnt: Invalid argument

No, it would not be. Try harder.

Regards,
David