Well, curiosity killed the cat (or in this case, the wolf :-), as they say,
so I went ahead and attempted an install onto my DOS/NT totin' 486/DX
here at work (Compaq Deskpro 66M, 1024x768 256-color card, 16M mem, 535MB
IDE drive).

First problem where I complained about invalid boot images was that I
tried to boot from the wrong disk.  That discovered, it booted fine.

Went thru, read the blurb on the screen about a pencil, paper and
calculator.  (Don't have a calculator, p&p works fine for me, thanks).
Missed the part where it said that I should have written down my disk
geometry, so had to boot from floppy *again*...

Okay, it boots OK.  I have a backup (thank goodness for small favours)
and a DOS bootable crunchy, so I can go ahead without abandon.  175MB C:
reserved for DOS/NT, 360MB D: reserved for UNIX.

Went in with pfdisk to check out the geometry, made notes of C: and D:
cylinder sizes, went back for an install run.

This install run TOTALLY hosed the partition table on the drive, so
I had to retry it.  Don't know what I did wrong, but I did something
wrong.

Boot from DOS, sys c:, and the like.  Had to reformat C:. :-(

Tried to load from a single drive, but of course couldn't since it
relied on the drive to get its filesystems from.

#define CLUELESS_IDJIT
#define SYSADMIN
#if defined(SYSADMIN) && defined(CLUELESS_IDJIT)
#define SHOULD_HAVE_KNOWN_BETTER
#endif

#ifdef SHOULD_HAVE_KNOWN_BETTER
set_attitude(SHEEPISH);

I went and printed out the INSTALL doc and actually read it.

unset_attitude();
#endif

Now things are going much smoother.  C: with DOS is peacefully co-
habiting with a nicely partitioned D:.  Managed to have spare space
for /var and /usr/src, which is gonna come in handy as soon as I
retrieve the source (can't wait to get X here, either).

Install, of course, put the BSD bootloader into rwd0d, which starts
at cylinder 0.  (Fortunately, Mr. Clueless here suddenly got promoted
with a flash of insight which enabled me to use disklabel to install
the bootblocks on rwd0c (the start of the D: partition).)

Looks like it's time to enter DOS mode and run that os-bs thing that
came on the utilities floppy.

Okay, did that, set BSD default active.

Now install from floppies that I made.  Nice to know they work.
Okay, I've installed everything except the base OS and half the compilers.
Screw it.  There's something here about loading via NFS, so I did all
the ifconfigs and routes and mounts and try it.  Whadaya know, it
works.

Now, reload NT from floppies...(about 45 min...)

Viola -- a large violin!  Er, Voila'!  It worked.  The three OSs are
now sharing a drive on the system.

Overall, I found the process very well constructed except that the
installed disklabel should be trying to write to the 'c' partition
and not the 'd' partition so that you don't end up clobbering your
DOS partitioning map.  Then, again, maybe I did something wrong...

I'm majorly impressed with the speed of BSD on a 486.  It blazes past
my SPARCstation.  I never knew IDE drives could work so fast!
All five fscks finish in less than 30 seconds!

Kudos to the installer and its author!

I had some other questions, but they'll have to wait as I seem to have
forgotten them...


--
 _______Wizardry is dead._____ _____WHO: Greywolf (my nameplate even says so)
/ ___\ _ \ __\ V / \  / /__ \| | __/WHAT: UNIX System Mangler...er, Admin
\ \| |   < _| ` ' \ '` / \/ /|_| _/ WHERE: Autodesk, Inc.  3 Harbor Dr.
 \___|_|\_\__\|_|  \/\/ \__/___/_|  Sausalito, CA 94965 (415) 332-2344 x4219
	see also: gandalf@netcom.com