"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:

> Mirian Crzig Lennox writes:
> > "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:
> > So, is there any way to tell disklabel what IDE partition to write the
> > disklabel on (so that I can write a real, functional label to
> > partition 2)?  I tried RTFM without success.
> 
> 1) Use fdisk to set the MBR of whatever MBR partition you want (say 2) 
> to 169 decimal.

165 decimal, actually.

> 2) "use disklabel". It will be perfectly happy. Your problem might be
> that you don't grok how to use disklabel,

No, my problem was that Linux wrote a bad label to my disk.  When I
did it by hand, it worked.  Lessons learned, don't use Linux fdisk to
frob NetBSD disklabels, don't jump to conclusions about what's going
wrong.

> but that is why we have sysinst -- to do this for you.

Actually, sysinst didn't quite DTRT for me.  It failed in kind of a
bizarre way:

First it asked me whether I wanted NetBSD on all or only part of my
disk.  I answered "only part".

Then it looked at the disk and found the NetBSD disklabel and my
NetBSD partitions, and displayed them correctly.  I answered "the
partitions are ok."

Then it went and told me to configure my NetBSD partitions(!), totally
ignoring the ones from the disklabel.  Additionally, it asked me to
allocate space from the entire disk, instead of looking at the space
reserved for NetBSD in /dev/rwd0c.

I hesitate to jump to more conclusions, but this looks like
suspiciously like buggy behavior to me on the part of sysinst.

-- 
Mirian Crzig Lennox                                Systems Anarchist
          "There's a New World Order coming every minute.
                      Make mine extra cheese."