Phil Nelson said:
> 
> >I could never get a Vectra Xu 6/200 to load NetBSD from the hard disk.
> >The best I could do is boot from floppy and have the floppy boot blocks
> >boot the scsi disk by default.  I do not know why this doesn't work.
> 
> I finally got my HP Vectra Xa to boot from the hard disk.  It has to
> do with using /sbin/fdisk and making sure NetBSD uses only the disk
> starting at "Cylinder 0, Head 1, Sector 1".  i.e. NetBSD can not use
> any space on the first track.  Once I did that, I got NetBSD to install
 
To get NetBSD to boot on the SCSI side of a Xu 6/200, I hacked 'biosboot' to
force the drive number to 0x80H and that seemed to do the trick.
Which seems to confirm what "Read error" on screen and the floppy drive
light seemed to indicate.
I use the whole disk for NetBSD i.e."c drive offset cylinder 0", but my "a drive"
is always offset cylinder 1. (Fear of Sybase :)
I don't know what that says about not using track 0.

There seems to be some discrepancy between what the BIOS is passing as the
drive number and what the mbr expects.

Problems also occur on the DOS side when moving working drives from an older
machine to the Xu, Nothing would boot except an IDE drive with DOS on it.
As a test, On the SCSI side, for DOS I eventually had to do an "FDISK /MBR"
with the 6.22 floppy to get it to work. FDISK also creates a drive geometry
of 255 Heads, 255 Cylinders and an ungodly number of spt. I don't know if that
is part of the problem or just an artifact.

I would like to disassemble the DOS mbr to find out what they are doing
differently but in the mean time "I boot" so it is a lower priority.

I am also thinking about a "format" utility a la SunOS, which would do away with "fdisk+disklabel" and all the assorted dodads one needs to create a disk.
Anyone care to comment Pro or Con

 
Cio
Patrick