Subject: Still No Install
To: None <endrizzi@sctc.com>
From: Gordon W. Ross <gwr@mc.com>
List: current-users
Date: 03/16/1995 10:20:20
> Date: Wed, 15 Mar 1995 10:06:29 -0600
> From: Michael Endrizzi <endrizzi@sctc.com>

> Config:
> 
>       1 gig ide running dual drive emulation 504meg/504meg (1024c,16h,63s)
>       split OS's, NetBSD on drive 1 and MSDOS on drive 2
> 
> Problem:
> 
>       install/disklabel always ignores my FDISK partition info and
>       then creates its own on cylinders 0->49 and claims it is
>       50,000 sectors long (actually 50*63=3,150 sectors) BUT the
>       NetBSD disk label info contains the correct size info i
>       used during the install.
>      
>       linux installs no problem
> 
> Questions:
> 
>       1) Eric Hvozda told me to use pfdisk and all my problems go away
>          but i'm back where i started. i tried using linux fdisk, o/s2
>          fdisk, norton utils diskedit. The MSDOS pfdisk i used was from 1991,
>          Is there a more recent one and where is it?

The most recent version is 1.3 (from Oct. 1990).  That works OK.
Note that an incomplete distribution of pfdisk has been propagated
around, somewhat to my dissapointment, because it omitted what I
consider some of the more clever parts of package.
The full release of pfdisk is available from:
	ftp.mc.com://pub/pfdisk-1.3.tar.Z

>       2) The MSDOS pfdisk reports the drive is 1023 cylinders but NetBSD
>          says its (correctly) 1024 cylinders. Who do i believe and what
>          numbers do [I] feed to the install (i've tried both)

The DOS implementation of getGeometry() in pfdisk actually reports the
"highest cylinder number" from the BIOS. (Yes, this is a bug).
You can override the geometry to set cylinders to the correct value.

>       3) During the install, it asks for offset in cylinders to NetBSD
>          partition. I've specified zero (0). Now the question is, "where
>          is cylinder 0?". Is it the first cylinder on the drive (i.e. sectors
>          0->62), or the second (63->125). How does NetBSD account for the MBR
>          on sector 0? I'm thinking that the NetBSD disklabel and FDISK info
>          are not in synch at this point because they start in different
>          places.

Cylinders and tracks are numbered from zero, sectors from one.

>       4) I'm convinced i have an old version of disklabel. The error
>          messages i get:
> 
>                     disk label not found
>                     Overwriting DOS partition [n]:
> 
>          do NOT appear in the source code. I am using inst-10.fs
>          from NetBSD-current. Does ftp:ftp.netbsd.or:NetBSD-current/inst-10.fs
>          have the current disklabel or not?
> 
> 						dreez