> when i tried to reboot from the hard drive, i got the boot prompt.
> after hitting return, however, nothing happened.  there was no
> indication of disk activity.  i rebooted from floppy, and a friend who
> already has NetBSD installed on his machine took a peek at the NetBSD
> partition of the hard drive.  as far as he could tell, the file system
> looked okay and it appeared as if the kernel had been copied
> correctly.
> 
> any ideas?

Does anyone know at which point during the boot sequence, BSD begins using
its own disk I/O drivers and stops using the BIOS.  

I suspect that at the point of this switch over, the geometry
information you have entered may no longer be recognized as valid.
Perhaps your secondary controller BIOS was copied into RAM and this has
been overwritten (or ignored) when the BSD boot started up.

In my setup (similar, i486 with 1 Gig EIDE harddisk) I found that I had
to use the true geometry and not a translated geometry since my
system's BIOS doesn't handle the big drives.  I had to make sure that
the DOS partition was in the first 1024 cylinders and that enough of
the root partition of BSD had to be in the first 1024 sufficient for
the BIOS to load the system prior to the BSD system taking over with
its own disk drivers (which support the EIDE enhanced modes).

I split the cylinders something like: 0-999 DOS, 1000-1799 BSD, 
1800-20?? Spare.

One last thing, make sure that the actual format on your drive is BIOS format
and not a proprietary format such as used by OnTrack Disk Manager otherwise
once BSD takes over everything will be confused.

Installing BSD is not a trivial matter.  Don't feel bad.  I must have
reinstalled DOS and BSD a half dozen times before getting it all to
work (or was that 'to work at all' :-) .  One last tip, remember to
save your Master Boot Sector before installing Windows-95 in the DOS
partition since window's installation overwrites it with something that
OS-BS can't handle (it exits with an error until you restore it, at
which point you can reinstall OS-BS).



Regards,

Darcy

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Darcy L. Watkins                email: dwatkins@glenayre.com
Senior Software Designer        phone: (604) 293-1611 [4534]
Glenayre R&D, Inc.              fax:   (604) 293-4317
1570 Kootenay Street,
Vancouver B.C. Canada V5K 5B8   home:  watkins@cyberstore.ca
                   http://www.glenayre.com
         http://www2.portal.ca/~tyjcom/usr/dwatkins
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