>From: "Markus Illenseer" <markus@tiger.teuto.de>
>Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 21:16:46 +0100

> Today I hooked up a new hard drive to my Pentium machine.  Drive is for
>NetBSD only.  Thought all I had to do is to edit a disklabel and write that
>one.  Disklabel reports me that there is an illegal DOS partition without
>NetBSD-id.  The drive was never been partitioned under DOS, nor does
>DOS-fdisk report any partitions.

Many drive makers cater to the DOS/Windoze market by partitioning and
formatting the drives for DOS before shipment.  Then the DOS lemmings
can drop it in, and it Just Works.

Note that this problem will occur only with the i386 port, unless
other ports are likewise modified to coexist with DOS partitions.

> My question:  What am I supposed to do before/while hooking a new drive?
>Is "pfdisk" the answer for all new drives even if for NetBSD-only?

pfdisk is one answer; 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd1d bs=1k count=1' is
another.
-- 
Mike Long <mike.long@analog.com>           http://www.shore.net/~mikel
VLSI Design Engineer         finger mikel@shore.net for PGP public key
Analog Devices, CPD Division          CCBF225E7D3F7ECB2C8F7ABB15D9BE7B
Norwood, MA 02062 USA       (eq (opinion 'ADI) (opinion 'mike)) -> nil