Excerpts from netbsd: 13-Oct-97 Re: Installboot???? Ronald Khoo@demon.net (851)

> I noticed that the new bootblocks
> don't seem to work if you haven't either got a DOS MBR+partition table
> or start ?d0a at the beginning of the drive.

The problem is that the new bootblocks don't fit into
the first 16 sectors of a partition anymore, they need
some space in a UFS filesystem in addition.
In principle, the 2 parts can be installed in different partitions,
but doing so opens new ways to mess up other
bootloaders, so "installboot" doesn't do it.
If you want to experiment,
dd if=/dev/?d0a of=/dev/?d0d count=16
should make your system boot. (I didn't try)

> I guess this is deliberate and expected behavior with the new bootblocks ?

It's a consequence of the simple (and secure) implementation
of "installboot". Otherwise, it would have to deal with the raw
partition and the BIOS partition table. (I just see that the last
manpage paragraph is bad: the "disks' raw partition" there
should read "character device of the disk partition" or so.)

I think it's not too hard to adjust the MBR partition table
(or to do the "dd" above, if one knows what he's doing...).
Hopefully, when we get "slices", things will be easier.

best regards
Matthias