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Hi Phil,

Thx very much for your help indeed! Well, I've got to tell you I have done all
you are saying in your response, including using most of the suggested
geometries by NetBSD 1.3.2 boot / installation process. Hell, I've modified the
geometry under DOS, Win95, even OS2 using the good old "PFDISK" utility
distributed on NetBSD CD-ROM. Surely I had to use FDISK after almost every
failed attempt to install.

Geometry setup feature within  NetBSD 1.3.2 sometimes changes the geometry so I
have to wipe out the disk contents entirely, which  needless to say, forces me
to use MS/FDISK either DOS or Win95. It takes far too long to repeat all these
exercises and search for consistencies. I'll try to give you as much info as I
can, but I have a feeling that I'm taking too much of your as well as my time
for this. I almost ran out of patience already!

Due to your overwhelming response to my question, I decided to spend one more
night testing this stuff out, in order to get exact account of what is
happening. My original disk geometry is gone, and all attempts to write it back
to disk fail. I am going to do the low-level SCSI formatting with software I
downloaded from Adaptec a year ago. But in the mean time I wish to tell you what
I recorded and remember from "countless" attempts I was trying since June 4, 98.

ATTEMPT #1
1. Starting with a functioning (Dual-boot) DOS/SCO; booting from NetBSD 1.3.2
floppy.
2. The 1st phase reported my disk geometry (sd0: 2014MB, 6810, 4, 151// 512
x4,124,736)
3. after selecting (a) {{ a. Install NetBSD to hard disk }} and (b) {{ Yes }} it
went to nowhere land  reporting {{sd0(ahb:0:0:0) timed out, ... tined out AGAIN
}}.
4. Hard boot.  // EISA config was now screwed up.
5. At this point I tried to progressively disable {{ Enhanced Mode }}, {{ Very
Fast }} to {{ Very Slow }}.
    The above four or five tries with different CMOS / EISA configurations, each
time returning to step #1 above all ended up with the same message in the
nowhere land (timed out) never coming to installation geometry feature at all!
6. I reinstalled my DOS 5 again (FDISK would recognize only 1GB), repeated the
steps #1-#3 with no difference.
7. I repeated the above with Win95 ........ (no difference).
8. Repeated the above with OS2 ............ (no difference).
9. Tried the "PFDISK 0" by changing the partition type to 4.2BSD (165)
10. Repeat #1.....  BREAKTHROUGH -- It passed into NetBSD geometry setup
11. Installing over entire disk I was able to load the distribution sets
12. After all sets were installed it hanged on {{ Extracting kern.aa }}
13. Installed OS2 (before asking for help I planed to install Linux in
combination with OS2 to gain at least the basic compatibility with the rest of
my NetNSD world).
14. I hate to use this Mickey mouse platforms, so I gave it one more chance ask
4 NetBSD-help (you guys), before I venture in semi-Unix waters.
That's it.

Let me go back to work, I'll try to make some sense out of this nonsense, and
record all steps, all the way, all the times...

Regards, Igor H. Pirnovar

Phil Nelson wrote:

> >Am I fighting a lost battle here, or is there some hope I can reuse my
> >old box?
>
> I'm running NetBSD on an old Compac 486/33 EISA system.  In fact, it
> currently has an uptime of over 150 day.  You should be able to get it
> up and running!
>
> Do you have a way to run DOS and run the DOS fdisk?  If so I recommend
> the following:
>
>         a) Boot to DOS, fdisk the disk and make one DOS primary partition.
>         b) Write down the geometry your BIOS use, if you can get it.
>         c) Boot the NetBSD-1.3.2 boot floppy and follow the installation.
>
>                 When the install reports the geometries, note that it
>                 should report 2 different geometries, the true geometry
>                 and the BIOS geometry.  The BIOS should match what you
>                 wrote down in b.  If not, they should be different.
>
>                 If they are different, DON'T change the BIOS geometry
>                 to the real geometry.  Accept them and continue.
>
> Let me know what happens and I'll try to help you get NetBSD on your old
> 486 EISA system.
>
> --
> Phil Nelson                    NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org
> e-mail: phil@cs.wwu.edu        !gifs: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
> http://www.cs.wwu.edu/~phil



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