Subject: Re: Problems with dual booting
To: Wolfgang Solfrank <ws@tools.de>
From: Frank van der Linden <frank@wins.uva.nl>
List: port-i386
Date: 04/05/2000 17:41:30
On Wed, Apr 05, 2000 at 05:28:41PM +0200, Wolfgang Solfrank wrote:
> FYI, to come back to the question whether your bios supports the newer
> method to access the disk, the new method would have used the start
> sector number, not the explicit begin cylinder/head/sector information.
> Since you are using the netbsd bootmanager, and that one always uses the
> new method to boot a partition, if that's available, it would have
> worked.  But since your bios doesn't support the new method, the
> bootmanager falls back to the old method, using those explicit numbers,
> and since they are bogus, it fails.

Slight correction: fdisk will only configure the bootselector to
use the int13 extensions (i.e. the new method) if a) it is available,
and b) there is a partition that is above 8G. Otherwise it will use
the old method.

Apparently there were some BIOSs that did advertise int13 extensions,
but got it wrong if you tried to use them < 8G. Hence this workaround.

- Frank