"Eric d'Halibut" <eric.halibut%gmail.com@localhost> writes: > I put NetBSD 6.0 on ancient Micron full tower -- dual PPro 180mhz Cool; that almost qualifies as retrocomputing - most old i386 stuff is just junk, but that's interesting. > Some time spent on google suggested 'installboot' might be the remedy, > but I am in over my head with that util I am afraid (as well as with > MUCH else besides, clearly <g>). So, if you can make a disklabel, newfs, use the fs, then the disk is basically ok. Some hints: man boot(8) The boot process on i386 has three stages: 1) fdisk -c /usr/mdec/mbr_bootsel 2) installboot, bootxx_ffsvX (depending; I use a smallish root with UFS1, and bigger data with UFS2) 3) /boot (copied from /usr/mdec to /) first the bios loads the mbr the mbr loads the first sector of the active partition that loads bootxx from after the label the bootxx_ loads /boot from the filesystem /boot loads /netbsd etc. In a partition, it's mbr, disklabel, bootxx_. The part I'm fuzzy on is whether you need an mbr boot block in the first block of a partition that starts at 63, but I think so. I hope this helps. Don't be afraid to read installboot really slowly and try to follow it, and to use -v when running it.
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