In article <200007271318.GAA17231@shell17.ba.best.com>,
   Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com> wrote:
> Last week I helped a coworker get his friend's PC running 1.4.2 out of one
> partition. The machine now triple-boots Win98, SuSE 6.3 Linux, and NetBSD.

> Problem #1. sysinst (both 1.4.1 and 1.4.2) mangles the C/H/S numbers in
> the MBR, even though it has been told to "use only part of the disk" and
> we didn't change any of the MBR partitions.

I have also been through this exercise recently, installing the
same version of NetBSD on a new PC. It had a disk larger than
eight gigabytes and I noticed that sysinst was complaining about
partitions not ending on cylinder boundaries and giving very
suspect values. Knowing that this was a new machine and that I
could do a complete reinstall of everything if I broke it, I
pushed on and luckily ended up with a working machine.

There was another problem I ran into that I have put down to
the large disk size.

Originally I had the NetBSD partition beyond the eight gigabyte 
mark on the disk and the NetBSD boot loader (the one that lets you
choose which OS to boot) would not boot the NetBSD partition. I
had to use the install floppy and boot wd0a:netbsd by hand. Some
time spent reading messages on Deja suggested that it was the
placement of the partition that was causing the problem, so I
moved the NetBSD partition below the eight gigabyte mark and
everything was fine after that.

I think that the moral of the story is that if you try to install
NetBSD on a large disk you will see some truly hideous things that
should not be exposed to the light of day.

Dave Daniels