On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Mike Long wrote:

> >Is this completely correct? I thought only the bootstrap code needed to 
> >lie within the BIOS addressable space of the disk, and that it didn't 
> >matter if the rest of the boot partition extended beyond it.
> 
> I'm not sure about the new boot code, but the old boot code used BIOS
> calls to load the kernel.  Since the kernel could be anywhere in the
> root partition, that meant that your entire root partition needed to
> be within the first 528 MB of the disk.

Ok, this I did not know! Even though it is something I probably could 
have guessed had I thought about it for a little bit, I did not realise 
it and have set up a system that I may make unbootable sometime in the 
future.

I would say it is very important that the install document be changed if 
this is still the case, becuase what it says currently does not, IMHO, 
suffice. In fact, it may even be wrong becuase there's a detail I'm now 
confused about. Is the BIOS addressable space less than 528Mb or less 
than 1024 cylinders? I know both are limitations, but are they the same 
issue?

To refresh, this is what the INSTALL for 1.2.1 says (I must admit I 
haven't checked if this has been changed in -current):

"Third (but related to the second point above), if you are using a hard
disk with more sectors than DOS or your controller's BIOS supports without
some kind of software translation utility or other kludge, you MUST
BE SURE that all partitions which you want to boot from must start below
cylinder 1024 by the BIOS's idea of the disk, and that all DOS partitions
MUST EXIST ENTIRELY BELOW cylinder 1024, or you will either not be able to
boot NetBSD, not be able to boot DOS, or you may experience data loss or
filesystem corruption.  Be sure you aren't using geometry translation that
you don't know about, but that the DOS "fdisk" program does!"

	- Joel Reicher