On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Hisashi T Fujinaka wrote:

> On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Andy Ruhl wrote:
>
>> On 2/27/07, Hisashi T Fujinaka <htodd@twofifty.com> wrote:
>>> I can boot /onetbsd, I can boot /netbsd.gz, but I can't boot /netbsd.
>>> This is on my i386-current machine. Any ideas?
>> 
>> Not enough info. Standard questions:
>> 
>> What is the output?
>> Did you verify that the kernel file is not corrupt?
>> Anything else to report?
>> 
>> Can't help if there isn't enough info.
>
> Let me first say that I rebuild daily, so I have some experience with
> odd errors. This one happens early in the boot process, when the kernel
> is loading. Usually you get the fake ASCII spinny gadget but in this
> instance it stops with "/".

What's your disk layout (fdisk + disklabel)?

On my laptop with an 80G drive, I've got a 30GB NTFS partition at the 
start followed by a 1GB FAT with the rest as NetBSD. If I only have one 
NetBSD partition, then booting works after a first installation, but if I 
copy new kernels on, etc. at some point it will fail. This is because the 
BIOS calls used by /boot can't read from the drive after (I guess) the 
32GB boundary and the kernel has moved away from the start of the 
partition. Old kernels (or perhaps gzipped copies of new ones) would 
potentially boot depending on where the file actually was on the disk. My 
solution was to have a 1GB / with the rest on /usr.

-- 
Stephen