Might be a statement of the obvious, but I had the NetBSD install clobber 
my DOS MBR first time I tried to install it. I (stupidly) ignored the 
warning about overwriting the disk that it gives.

The reason was simply that I got the disk geometry wrong. Due to 
translation, it didn't agree with what DOS was using.

Now that I think about it, I realise that I don't actually know if the 
MBR goes beyond one block. Does it? If not, the problem is less obvious, 
but I can definitely say that translation did it.

	- Joel

On Sat, 21 Jun 1997, Rick Byers wrote:

> 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
> 
> =========================================================================
> Rick Byers                                      Internet Access Worldwide
> rickb@iaw.on.ca                                System Admin, Tech Support
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> 
>