Hi,

> >I have two SCSI disks in this set up, one 205Mb internal and
> >an external 1.05Gb disk.  Can I install NetBSD over the two
> >disks as in NetBSD-1.5 it assumes you are only installing on
> >one disk?
>
> It is possible; I've done similar setups in the past.

Good!

> > The OpenBSD installer allows labelling and writing
> >mount-points of sd0 *and* sd1 before committing the
> >installation.  Any ideas.
>
> You'll need to go to the shell to manually do part of the setup.

Ok.  Disklabels - fun... get the calculator out...

> Looks okay.  How much RAM does your Classic have?  If
> it has enough, I'd do:

Only 16Mb but that should be enough.  NetBSD isn't that
hungry for memory though by the looks.  I will put some
more in when I find some for a reasonable price as I'm
going to slaughter the poor thing with a copy of
PostgresSQL.

> sd0a /
> sd0d /var
> sd1a /usr
> sd1b swap
> sd1d /home
> swap /tmp

That should do the job.

> Something like that.  There's an option to get a shell in
> one of the installer submenus[1].  The basic strategy, as
> I recall, would be to create and edit the disklabels from
> the shell, exit back into the installer, and do a reinstall.

I will try that tonight.  At least I know it's feasable
before I go and do it.

> I don't recall all the details anymore.  You may need to
> mount everything (relative to /mnt) before exiting the
> shell, or just create an fstab (in /tmp?) before exiting
> the shell back into the installer, or some other
> variation.

I will play with it and see - theres nothing mission critical
(ha ha) on it at the moment so I can trash the disks no
probs.  Mounting on /mnt sounds like a good idea.  I will
probably go take the installer scripts to bits and see how
they work.

> The dmesg output looks normal; I've got such a drive on
> an IPC that I'm running.  As for the error on mt....
> Is this the only drive?

Yep - its the only drive.

> If so, what does just `mt rew` get you?  If that's giving
> you errors I'd be suspicious of the tape(s).  I've been
> dealing with about a 14% failure rate on new tapes, and
> the ones that aren't bad don't necessarily last that long.

It's not tapes AFAIK - the motor doesn't even power up so I
can't tell.  I've also never used QIC-150 tapes (only DATs
in WinNT boxen unfortunately), so I don't know what typical
QIC drives are like sound or look wise :P  I will try `mt
rew' when I get home as I'm at work in the world of fast
systems now :)  I specified the tape name while doing it
before aka which might have buggered something up:-

     # mt -t /dev/rst0 rewind

Normally I get a message such as:-

st0: I/O error

and the tape just sits silently.  I'm beginning to think
that the drive has had it.  Either that or I'm stupid (a
far more probable hypothesis).

Thanks for your insight - I will try your ideas.

Cheers,

- Chris.