> > > I don't know whether I meet your question exactly but...
> > >
> > > yesterday I installed a new NetBSD 1.4.1 over my home network onto a
> > > IBM 18 GB SCSI disk (ok, a little oversized, but just to try it...)
> > > in a DECstation 2100.
> >
> > Hey, that exactly answers me question.  Now, now long will it take you
> > to fill up 18gb on a 2100.....(:+}}...
> 
> I don't think, that's the right answer :-(
> It only works, if your bootfile is in the first 1 GByte.
> AFAIR, the PROM uses only short SCSI-1 commands, so it only can reach the
> first sectors.

For the sake of discussion, on a boot drive, where partition a was always
first, and under say 100mb in size, would it matter how big the drives
were, or would it matter how big following partitions were?

If it has the root partition well under the 1gig limit, then it should
never reach a condition where boot was outside that limit.

If that was so, then only file system sizes might be a problem, and I
can't imagine wanting to make file system much larger than 1 or 2 gig,
because of the size of the tables involved, and possible speed reductions
in handling such large partitions.

Is that reasonable?

I guess my concern was whether or not the file system would wrap around
inadvertently to track 0 if it reached a certain size or cylinder count
limit.  If that is not a particular problem, then I would not expect
any real problems across disk sizes, except for may be the odd condition
where a whole large drive was used as one partition (probably not good
practice on any system).

I just did not want to come up into any problematic combinations that
might nuke my system.

Thanks

Bob