Just a thought - do you have any anti-virus options enabled in the
	bios that might stop it from writing the boot blocks?

                   David/abs             (david@mono.org)

.---- I've been too drunk to love ----.--- I've been too drunk to remember -.
|          Too drunk to care          |     The hell of the night before    |
|  Looked like death, felt like Hell  |    I've been drinking myself blind  |
`------ Been the worse for wear ------'--- And still I'll drink some more --'

On Tue, 24 Sep 1996, Chris Jones wrote:

> This may sound like a silly question, but how do you make a disk
> bootable under the i386 port?  I know I've done this before, and I am
> almost positive I'm doing the right thing, but it doesn't work.
> 
> I've got a 386 with an IDE disk (1001 cyl; no geometry translation)
> that I want to devote entirely to NetBSD.  This is the only disk in
> the machine, so it should work.  I create a disktab entry in which
> partitions c and d both occupy the entire disk, and then I make a, b,
> e, and f appropriately for my needs (all on cylinder boundaries;
> nothing weird there).  Then I do a "disklabel -w -B wd0 st1144at"
> (that's the name of my disktab entry), and I verify that the label was
> written correctly with a "disklabel -r wd0".  No asterisks show up on
> the right hand side or anything that could possibly indicate an error
> or problem.
> 
> When I reboot, all I get is the message "Read error".  From poking
> around, I'm guessing that this is coming from the primary bootstrap; I
> also know that the primary bootstrap is getting written to sector 0
> because I can use dd to read that sector.  However, I don't know
> enough about the disk layout to find where the secondary bootstrap
> code would be at.
> 
> FWIW, I've tried many permutations of various ideas I've had, in
> addition to the above.  I've tried making partition c start on
> cylinder 1 instead of cylinder 0, resizing other partitions
> appropriately, and installing os-bs.  I've tried all kinds of
> different sizes for partitions, and there are some other things I've
> tried that I don't remember right now.
> 
> Oh -- I almost forgot.  I'm using NetBSD/i386 1.2 from the snapshot on
> ftp.netbsd.org.
> 
> TIA for any help.
> 
> Chris
> 
> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Chris Jones                                      cjones@rupert.oscs.montana.edu
>            Mad scientist in training...
> "Is this going to be a stand-up programming session, sir, or another bug hunt?"
>