On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, Larry Colen wrote:

> I was installing netbsd 1.5 on a Dell Poweredge 350 off the CDROM
> from Demon News.
> 
> It would complete the installation.
> I'd reboot and it would not even go into the kernel and would just
> display the message: 
> invalid partition table
> 
> It seemed to be fixed by rather than just using the whole disk, only
> installing a a part of the disk, which seemed to force the system to
> use a dos style partition table.
> 
> I don't know if anyone else has had this problem, or if it's
> considered a bug, or just the way things work (or don't work).

I've had similar results when installing 1.5 on Compaq machines.  It seems
it's because sysinst will place the NetBSD partition in the last slot of
the DOS partition table.  Exiting from sysinst, doing an fdisk -u and
moving the partition to the 1st slot (0'th entry), then doing an fdisk -a
to make partition 0 active works like a charm.  For some reason, it looks
like the Compaq machines like to have partitions filled from 0 up...

[I must confess that these are older compaqs, such as Proliant 5000 and
some older Deskpros, however, nothing below a PPro in processor, so they
aren't absolutely ancient]

Funny, but I didn't ever try installing to part of the disk - I've always
used the entire disk for NetBSD... I must try this sometime to see if I
get the same results as you.

-
Jon
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