I have an Epox 8k7a box that is currently running 1.5.2 off of scsi
drives. I picked up a new 40MB Seagate ATAIV (ST340016A) drive and
tried to install NetBSD on it:

With 1.5.2, it installs fine, but I get the 'invalid partition
table' error when I try to boot off of it. I have to boot with
something else and invoke installboot to get the bios to see this
drive for booting.

With the latest snapshot :
/pub/NetBSD/arch/i386/snapshot/20020410-1.5ZC-XFree86-4.2.0 the
kern-GENERIC.tgz I pulled off of several mirrors (also) was corrupted.
hopefully a fixed one will be available soon, however:

1) I had to manually invoke installboot again with this installation

2) I tried creating two partitions and booting off of the first
(among other things). Same results

3) the installer program locked up every time I exited it normally.
(anyone else have this problem?)

This is a new 40G drive with a fairly new mb/bios. Why can't NetBSD
boot off of it without manually setting up a boot partition?

Interestingly, this box it takes only ~35 seconds to unpack and
install all of the 'standard with X11' sets to this new drive -
looking forward to using it.

-----------------------------
info:

pchb0: Advanced Micro Devices product 0x700e (rev. 0x13)
ppb0 at pci0 dev 1 function 0: Advanced Micro Devices product 0x700f (rev. 0x00)
pci1 at ppb0 bus 1
pci1: i/o space, memory space enabled
vga1 at pci1 dev 5 function 0: ATI Technologies product 0x5246 (rev. 0x00)
wsdisplay0 at vga1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation)
pcib0 at pci0 dev 7 function 0
pcib0: VIA Technologies VT82C686A (Apollo KX133) PCI-ISA Bridge (rev. 0x40)
pciide0 at pci0 dev 7 function 1: VIA Technologies VT82C686A (Apollo KX133) ATA1
00 controller
pciide0: bus-master DMA support present
pciide0: primary channel configured to compatibility mode
wd0 at pciide0 channel 0 drive 0: <ST340016A>
wd0: drive supports 16-sector pio transfers, lba addressing
wd0: 38166 MB, 16383 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 78165360 sectors
wd0: 32-bit data port
wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 5
pciide0: primary channel interrupting at irq 14
wd0(pciide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 5 (using DMA data transfers)


$ fdisk /dev/rwd0
NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
cylinders: 16383 heads: 16 sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)

BIOS disk geometry:
cylinders: 1024 heads: 255 sectors/track: 63 (16065 sectors/cylinder)

Partition table:
0: <UNUSED>
1: <UNUSED>
2: <UNUSED>
3: sysid 169 (NetBSD)
    start 63, size 78165297 (38166 MB), flag 0x80
        beg: cylinder    0, head   1, sector  1
        end: cylinder 1023, head 254, sector 63

(disklabel)
8 partitions:
#        size   offset     fstype   [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
  a:  2140929       63     4.2BSD     1024  8192    86   # (Cyl.    0*- 2123)
  b:  4196304  2140992       swap                        # (Cyl. 2124 - 6286)
  c: 78165297       63     unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0*- 77544)
  d: 78165360        0     unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 77544)
  e: 71828064  6337296     4.2BSD     1024  8192    86   # (Cyl. 6287 - 77544)