Subject: Re: sysinst, two more notes
To: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU>
From: Jukka Marin <jmarin@pyy.jmp.fi>
List: current-users
Date: 02/17/1999 12:40:03
On Wed, Feb 17, 1999 at 02:22:47AM -0800, Jonathan Stone wrote:
> 
> >Or have an option "Do you want to keep the old mbr code (y/N)?"
> >(to overwrite it by default).
> 
> No.  We should *never* over-write existing MBR code, unless the user
> explictly asks for that to be done.  (the only reasonable exception of
> updating MBR code that we know is old NetBSD MBR code, preserving the
> MBR partition table.

Well, I just installed NetBSD 1.3.3 on a system that had NetBSD 1.3_BETA
on the disk.  I picked the default settings in sysinst and install went
OK - but guess what?  It doesn't boot off the hard disk!

I erased the first sector of disk and did "installboot...", still no boot.
Now I'm installing again from scratch after erasing a few megabytes of
the disk.

_This_ _is_ _annoying_.  I don't know WHY the boot loader NEVER seems to
work unless it gets overwritten by the new one, but I have had the same
problem on 4 or 5 machines within a week now.

I don't want the default in NetBSD 1.4 to be "screw the user until he
knows well enough".  If you DO have a custom boot loader, you KNOW about
it and can pick the correct option in the menu.  If you are new to NetBSD,
you don't know that you have to erase the old boot loader and then you're
lost.

Sigh.

  -jm