On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 12:28:06 -0800 (PST)
Hisashi T Fujinaka <htodd@twofifty.com> wrote:


> >
> > 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.
> 
> That's probably the problem. I had a few separate partitions for /usr
> /home /var and / but I has having problems with inodes so I
> consolidated everything. Oh, well.
> 
In the past, I've sometimes worked around similar issues via BIOS
updates.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb