Hello,

I "installed" NetBSD 1.3.2 on the hard disk of my 8 Mb hp340c+ machine
but it wouldn't boot; and when I press the space bar at start-up it
doesn't recognize the hard disk as being bootable.

My hard disk is not on the list of "supported" disks. It's a HP7320 and
I had HP Pascal 3.22 previously installed on it. I reformatted the hd
with the mediainit utility provided in the Pascal installation package
and the information it printed out is summarized below:

Model      Cylinders        Tracks/Cylinder        Sec/Track       Total
Blocks
-----      ---------        ---------------        ---------      
------------	
HP7320        124                70                    23           
199640

204.4 Mb in 8 cyl groups (16 c/g, 26.38 Mb/g, 2048 i/g) 

Looked like its HFS file system had 1024 bytes/sector. So I booted the
hp340 with rbootd from a PC running Linux and disklabelled it with 46
Sec/Track to get a 512 bytes/sector disk. The number of sectors per
cylinder is now 3220 and the total number of sectors is 399280. Then I
created the following partitions:

Partition    Size    Offset
---------    ----    ------
  a         48300     3220
  b         48300    51520
  c        399280        0
  d        299460    99820

Then I copied the miniroot-132.fs via NFS to rd0b. Transfer was
successful but when I tried to boot it said: 

boot: rd0b:/netbsd -s
Booting: No such file or directory

Hopefully, I also have a magneto-optical drive, a Bering 5600 (also
"unsupported"...) with 2x300 Mb cartridges. I formatted and disklabelled
a cartridge and copied the miniroot file system to its rd1b partition
and then managed to boot from it. 

The installation program started by "recognizing" rd0 (the hd) as being
a 7958B disk and rd1 (the MO) as being a 7933H disk. I noticed that both
the 7958B (786 Cyl, 9 Tr/Cyl, 42 Sec/Tr) and the 7933H (1321 Cyl, 13
Tr/Cyl, 32 Sec/Tr) are described in the /etc/disktab.shadow file while
my HP7320 and Bering5600 MO are not. 

I disklabelled my rd0 hard disk again as follows:

Partition    Size    Offset
---------    ----    ------
  a        347760     3220
  b         48300   350980
  c        399280        0

Then I installed NetBSD to rd0a. Everything seemed to be ok (except that
when the file systems was created on rd0a the same error message
appeared twice saying something like "hard error:...sn-3220...write
error at" (followed by a sector number around 319000 that I don't
remember exactly)--and I interpreted that a warning of a bad sector
somewhere on the hard disk). At the end I got the "successful
installation" message and told to halt the system then reboot it. 

Upon "rebooting" the computer, nothing happens, as if there were no
bootable hard disk available!


My guess is that this problem must be in relation with my hard disk not
being "supported". But I cannot imagine there isn't a workaround for it.
Somehow the hard disk is not recognized as bootable; maybe during the
installation the program "recognized" it as being another type of disk
and wrote something on the boot area in the wrong format. However, the
rest of the data seems to be ok because when I reboot the hp via the
network (from linux), boot from the MO and rerun the install, stop it
with a CTRL-C, then mount rd0a in mnt (mount /dev/rd0a /mnt) I can see
the files in /mnt correctly. 


Maybe I could mount miniroot-132.fs in rw rather than ro mode, then edit
/etc/disktab.shadow with vi from the install program to include data on
my HP7320 disk and rerun the installation program. Does anyone think
that would be a reasonable think to do?

I need your help. I'm not a computer pro, I only have basic skills and
strongly wish to make this system work because I think it's a beautiful
machine.

Thank you for any help you can provide. Please reply directly to this
address: cocea@necker.fr


Sincerely yours,

Laurentiu Cocea


-- 
Laurentiu COCEA, M.D., M.Sc.
Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale, U.373
Faculte de Medecine Necker, 8e etage, porte 811Ter
156 rue de Vaugirard, 75730 Paris Cedex 15, France
phone:(33)14061-5384  fax:(33)14061-5590  e-mail:cocea@necker.fr