Subject: Re: NetBSD and FreeBSD co-existing
To: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU>
From: Rick Byers <rickb@iaw.on.ca>
List: port-i386
Date: 06/21/1997 09:46:14
On Fri, 20 Jun 1997, Jonathan Stone wrote:

> I have never, ever gotten this to work, and (as you know:) I'm pretty
> persistent with such things.  I'e installed NetBSD onto five machines
> that already had Linux on them.  I always pre-prepared an MBR
> partition and marke it as 386BSD before beginning the install.  The
> NetBSD installation clobbered the bootblocks every single time.  Other
> people say they haven't been able to reproduce this.

If there is on partition type 165 (*BSD), then NetBSD writes the disklabel
to the beginning of the disk (from what I can tell).  Otherwise it writes
it to the beginning of the partition markes as #165.  This shouldn't be a
problem with Linux/NetBSD (I have both + Dos co-existing without a
problem).  A problem does arrise with FreeBSD/NetBSD because (AFAIK) they
use the same partition type.  If the disklabel formats are identical, then
you should be able to share a disklabel and partition for the two systems,
(just tell NetBSD to boot from sd0f or something). This would pose some
problems with OS-BS booting the 2nd one though..

Rick

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