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. > 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 > (Trying to create a diff would help you to learn too, sending a bug > report will not.) this is simply not true. writing a useful, informative bug report needs research, testing, etc. i have learnt a lot by sending bugs. in fact, did not send bug reports because in the process of writing it i realized what i was doing wrong. maybe if i had started writing that report for this issue, i would have realized the mistake myself. -f -- to have a friend you must first be one.
