Subject: Re: reworked idea for reducing BIOS headache.
To: Robert V. Baron <rvb@cs.cmu.edu>
From: Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com>
List: tech-install
Date: 10/02/1998 02:51:09
> There is a program in the "floppies" directory, pfdisk.exe.  It is a
> DOS program that does close to what you want.  You must give it a BIOS
> disk unit number.  Then it lets you edit the mbr on this disk.  If you
> create a BIOS partition with type 165 or 169, then NetBSD will know to
> use it, when it goes to that disk.  Pfdisk also sets the end CHS to be
> the last track -1 and last sector.  So NetBSD will correctly intuit
> the bios geometry after this program has run.

Yes, and my solution to the BIOS geom problem is to distill out little
pieces of pfdisk and insert them into the bootstrap loader, so that install
disks (and maybe normal ones, it'd be an option) can be built to display
a list of bootable devices plus BIOS info about each. Before you install
you pick your disk from the menu and have the BIOS geometry imprinted on
the disk (via a pfdisk-style method).

Then you load the install kernel and sysinst, and just take the defaults.

Unfortunately I've been distracted the last couple of nights trying to
get -current to finally settle down and build.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com