Subject: Re: netBSD 1.0 and Multi partitioned drives
To: William Fink <finkw@ditco.disa.mil>
From: Simon J. Gerraty <sjg@zen.void.oz.au>
List: port-i386
Date: 09/17/1995 22:02:02
>      Based on the number of replies I received, nobody must be running 
>      netBSD on a p.c. with a LARGE (1GB) IDE disk that is also running DOS. 
>       While I understand that most people who would be interested in 
>      running netBSD are UN*X guru's that would _never_ use a feeble OS such 
>      as DOS, I need it because I use my PC for work.

Well, I recently installed -current on a notebook with a 500Mb disk
which also provides DroS and Windoze for my wife...  (when she can get
her hands on it :-)

It was really quite painless.  I used FIPS (the First nondestructive
Interactive Partition Splitting program) to split the disk - that
worked very well (though I did do a backup first...).  I used pfdisk
to mark the BSD partition as type 0xA5 and then just did the normal
BSD install.

I may have to repeat the above to steal another 50Mb from the DOS
partition. 

I'm using BTEASY to select the OS to boot.

No complaints so far.

>      I get the following message when I try to install netBSD/i386 1.0
>      
>         wd0: wdcontrol: geometry failed: status 0 error 0

Don't think I've every seen that so cannot comment but...

>      PFDISK and the cmos values are different...I know why, but how do I 
>      deal with it?

As far as I know you should always tell *BSD etc to use the same
geometry as the BIOS has.  Anything else is doomed to a corrupted
disk. 

--sjg