> On Mar 3, Ken Harrenstien wrote
> > 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:
> > [...]
> 
> This may be a problem with how NetBSD handles the BIOS geometry:
> it gets it from the MBR, and not from the BIOS (should be fixed for
> 1.4). So, with a virgin disk it may get wrong geometries values.

Shouldn't it be possible to get it from the drive itself?  This is
SCSI, after all.  The install did give me a hard time about the geometry
and I had to change the head/sector factors to get the #-sector count
under 64.  Then later it asked me whether to use real or bogus
geometries, with no clue as to what the implications of either might
be; the INSTALL document doesn't mention this question at all.
So yes, it's possible the geometry was "incorrect" in some sense.

I have not yet seen anything that clearly describes just how the
MBR/bootstrap/partition madness works in the PC world, so my ability to
understand what's going on is fairly limited.  If the distribution
already includes such a description and I haven't found it, please send
a pointer.

> The following ususally solves the problem:
> boot from a dos floppy with the fdisk utilitie. Run 'fdisk /mbr'; then
> fdisk to create a partition (which may be erased later by the NetBSD install
> if you want, the goal here is just to get fdisk to write a partition table).
> Then reboot with the NetBSD install floppy, it should now get the BIOS
> geometry rigth.

OK, I'll try this if I can't find any way to salvage all the data
already installed.  (Unfortunate that we still can't seem to escape the
Microsoft Tax.)

Thanks for the help!
--Ken