On Fri, 27 Nov 1998, Patrick Welche wrote:
> Marinier, M. Claude, G. wrote:
> > 
> > The Maxtor 88400D8 seems to want me to exclude the first track (63
> > sectors). When I tried to start at the beginning of the disk, newfs gave
> > me a 'read only' error. After building the system as described above, I
> > reconfigured the PC so the Maxtor was wd0 and it would not boot (could not
> > find a bootable disk). What does the install disk do that I am not doing?
> >
> > Note that other disks (e.g. Quantum LPS540A) do not seem to have this
> > requirement. I can start at 0 and newfs works well.
> 
> Re 63 free sectors at the beginning of a i386 disk:
> Are you giving the whole disk over to NetBSD? If so, you shouldn't need to
> leave free space at the beginning, HOWEVER, some broken BIOSes seem to insist on
> finding some sort of DOSish MBR partition information there. Are the BIOSes of
> your 2 machines the same? ISTR Wolfgang Solfrank committed a fix for this, but
> it won't be in 1.3.2.

The whole disk is for NetBSD. The two BIOSes are different. I got the QDI
"Legend I" to work by using 'fdisk' to setup an acceptable MBR with DOS
style partitions. The Intel 440 did not have the same problem.

There are a lot of 'DOSisms' in the PC architecture. I come from the
VAX/VMS, Alpha/VMS, and SPARC/SunOS world. This is an unexpected extra
layer of complexity.

By the way, is the BIOS used only during the early stages of the
boot process? I assume that NetBSD normally avoids the BIOS.

> > Please confirm that the primary boot code is installed in the disk label
> > area. Is this area counted by disklabel?
> 
> I am not the person to confirm anything, but my understanding is that it
> appears at the beginning of the NetBSD portion of the disk - usually 'a' and
> 'c' start at the same place...

The 'd' partition starts at the beginning of the disk and the 'a' and 'c'
partitions start after the first track (in my case at sector 63, counting
from 0).

> > Is there an existing document I can read about all this magic?
> 
> http://cynjut.neonramp.com/FAQ_06

This was a useful reference.

Thanks Patrick.

And to all the NetBSD team: thanks for a great OS.

--------------------
Claude Marinier, Information Technology Group    claude.marinier@dreo.dnd.ca 
Defence Research Establishment Ottawa (DREO)    (613) 998-4901  FAX 998-2675
3701 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario  K1A 0Z4         http://www.dreo.dnd.ca