Summary: format partition tag

From: Feist, Bruce (feibr02@mail.cai.com)
Date: Tue May 13 1997 - 15:32:31 CDT


My original question:

What is the significance of the tag defined using the format command for
each partition (for example, 'swap' and 'user')?

>Ray (rtrzaska@uk.mdis.com[SMTP:rtrzaska@uk.mdis.com]) reports:
>
>historic, and of no use whatsoever, just for comment - and
>is limited to those fairly poor comments because it is just a bit setting
>within a byte.
>
>this field is completely ignored within solaris.
>
Rich Pieri replied:

>So that you do not accidentally mount a user data partition as a swap
>partition, clobbering everything on it.
>
I'm not sure how this would prevent that, especially since it's possible
to share swap partitions with the /tmp user data partition.

Leo Crombach said:

The tag is to help identify the partition. It is for the administrators
>benefit and has no bearing on disk operation/maintenance.

So, all in all, it sounds as though it's not really used for much of
anything other than minor documentation.

Thanks, everyone!



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