Hi,

I tried to install 1.3.3 via FTP and gave up after several hours of
frustration.

I did read the entire INSTALL document, pulled over the boot floppy
image, took off all drives except a fresh virginal 2.1G drive, and
did my best, but:

(1) The disk partitioning mechanism appears to be broken.  Nearly
anything I tried to modify about the NetBSD partition would cause the
start/size fields to vanish and wound up giving me a 0.0Meg space.
I couldn't even modify any of the other partitions without something
weird happening.  Many floppy reboots trying various combos.

(2) Finally I gave up all hope of leaving room on the disk for an
alternative OS and simply accepted what the install script gave me for
a default (for the case where NetBSD was not to use the entire disk).
Installation proceeded OK from then on, except that after wrapping
things up and rebooting, the BIOS couldn't find any OS to load from the
disk.  I tried a number of things (fdisk -a, installboot, etc) in an
attempt to tickle the magic bits, but failed to find anything that
would work.  Yes, the partition was marked active.  It *did* work to
reboot from the floppy and interrupt the 5-second boot timeout and then
provide "boot sd0a:netbsd" as an alternative -- then it'd all fire up
properly.  But not acceptable for a production system.

The machine is a standard Dell workstation of 2-3 years' vintage
(133MHz Pentium) with a built-in SCSI controller (no IDE hard drives)
and nothing out of the ordinary that I can detect.  Let me know if you
want any more details or if there's something undocumented I should
try.

FWIW I also tried FreeBSD.  Its partitioning went much better, but it
flunked on the reboot test too -- got as far as loading its boot
manager and displaying the default OS/partition, but then wedged with
no response to keyboard input.

For a while I wondered if these might both be a symptom of the BIOS
1024-cylinder limitation, but I thought that surely the install scripts
wouldn't provide me with a default that wasn't going to work (not that
I was able to change it anyway).  Besides which, isn't installboot
supposed to put the secondary boot loader in a reserved low part of the
disk?

Sigh.

--Ken