While not strictly a NetBSD issue, it is somewhat related.

I recently bought a Sony vaio 505ve and installed netbsd on it.  In
the process of formatting a save-to-disk (STD) partition the buggy
Sony program phdisk proceeded to re-format partition 0 (the dos
partition) instead of the STD partition (partition 3).  It did
correctly identify partition 3 as the STD partition, and correctly
printed out the STD partition's size.  I'm not exactly sure why it
then decided to nuke the wrong partition.

I've spent an unsuccessful day of using netbsd and a CDROM mounted on
my desktop system to copy the "recovery cd" to the viao and try to
install from a disk copy of the cd.  The files are all in a DOS
subdirectory and the pathnames in recover.bat have all been edited to
point to the on-disk copy of the cdrom files.  The recover.bat file is
running, but the "unpackw.com" script is bailing out.  Other folks
have mumbled that Sony forces you to buy their CDROM drive, but I
don't know how this is enforced.  I don't know if unpackw.com is
checking for the right kind of cdrom or if there is something else
going on here.

In any case, I was wondering if anyone in the SF Bay Area might be
willing to loan out a Sony Vaio CDROM drive for an evening in exchange
for a case of their favorite brew.  I really would hate to go out and
buy the overpriced $300 sony cdrom to install an OS that I only need
in order to configure the notebook's bios.

-wolfgang
-- 
       Wolfgang Rupprecht <wolfgang+gnus@dailyplanet.wsrcc.com>
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