The SGI / MIPS firmware allows booting from special boot files, which are managed by the partition table. In Parted, these boot files are treated as logical partitions inside an extended partition.
For example:
Disk label type: mips Minor Start End Type Filesystem Name Flags 9 0.000 2.732 extended 17 0.002 0.002 logical sgilabel 18 0.003 1.162 logical symmon 19 1.404 1.670 logical sash 1 2.732 8555.212 primary xfs root 2 8555.213 8682.270 primary swap
Partition 9 is the extended partition (volume header in SGI/MIPS terminology) where the boot files may lie. Partitions 17, 18 and 19 are the boot files. There names can be manipulated with parted's name command. Partitions 1 and 2 are normal partitions. They can't have names.
Note that Linux doesn't see the boot files as partitions (maybe it should?). So /dev/hda17 doesn't exist in Linux. You should use dvhtool(8) to manipulate boot files.
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