Rodney M. Hopkins <rhopkins@sunflower.com> wrote:

>I have to agree.  In fact, I believe I gave you my solution to this very
>problem over on the OpenBSD mailing list a week or so ago, Kevin.  Bob
>Nestor and I have also had this discussion when I was going through my
>installation problems back in September or October of last year as well.  I
>had the EXACT same problems Kevin and Brain describe on attempting to do my
>install of NetBSD and OpenBSD using Installer 1.1g and 1.1f and mkfs 1.45
>on a Quantum Fireball 1.2GB drive.  Again, I have no termination issues,
>although my drive happens to be internal.  I also attempted the Installer
>memory increase trick and it didn't do anything for me either, Kevin.  I
>too formatted, reformatted and repartitioned the darn thing a gazillion
>times before I got it to work.  Now that the system is up, I have no
>problems with the drive, and not a single error (though I do have to run
>the SBC kernel) but having all these small partitions running around is a
>pain as my /usr partition is rapidly filling with /src/sys and /X11R6 on
>it.  I currently have no way to get the rest of the source code on the
>machine.  Not because it lacks the disk space, but because I had to split
>the drive up so much to get things to install.

Rodney,

I recall trying to help you with your problem and as I remember you were 
running some tests for me when you found a solution.  You didn't want to 
rerun Mkfs at that point and destroy a working setup and that's the last 
I heard of the problem.

As for your current problem, have you considered building a small NetBSD 
partition that can be inited with Mkfs and loaded with the Installer, and 
placing the rest of your NetBSD space in one large partition.  Then 
running from NetBSD on the small partition use "newfs" to initialize the 
large partition.  You'll also have the option of making this a BSD 4.4 
filesystem although that will be incompatible with the Installer.  In any 
case if you're having problems with Mkfs or the Installer on these larger 
partitions you wouldn't want to populate it with the Installer since it 
uses the same disk I/O functions as Mkfs.

-bob