David and Manuel,

Thank you both for your comments.

The new install is intended for the second MBR partition, I've dreams of 
using xen.

The "I" flag was set in the MBR phase - partition b, and the MBR 
partition marked as netbsd.  During the disklabel phase the second MBR 
partition was divided into "/" and swap, no other partitions were to be 
available to netbsd.

Partitioning a drive is always a frightening procedure and this was just 
the second time I'd used netbsd's install software, the first time was 
an empty disk install.  I went back to the begining of the install 
procedure several times to re-read the instructions.  The netbsd help 
page 
http://www.netbsd.org/guide/en/chap-exinst.html#chap-exinst-partitions 
doesn't seem discuss the "I" flag or on how to choose am MBR partition 
other than the first.

I've been advised that odd things can occur if you restart the install 
software without rebooting the machine.  I may have been a victim of this...

You've confirmed my suspission that setting the "I" flag in fdisk is the 
way to tell the install software which MBR partition the new install is 
ment for.

What is the effect of the "a" and "d" flags?

Frank

David Laight wrote:

>On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 08:17:34PM +0200, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
>  
>
>>On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 01:37:38PM +1000, frank brierley wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>How do you tell the netbsd install software which partition to install 
>>>to?  There is an install to here flag settable in the fdisk portion of 
>>>the process but that didn't seem to send the install where it needed to go.
>>>      
>>>
>>Are you talking about MBR partition or NetBSD's disklabel partition ?
>>For MBR partition, sysinst will install to the first partition of type
>>169, I think.
>>    
>>
>
>As above it SHOULD use the partition on which you set the I flag.
>More correctly that is the partition that the next phase of the
>installation will split into netbsd partitions.
>The actual installation will go into the '/' partition of the final
>disklabel editing menu.
>
>	David
>
>  
>