Marinier, M. Claude, G. wrote:
> 
> The Maxtor 88400D8 seems to want me to exclude the first track (63
> sectors). When I tried to start at the beginning of the disk, newfs gave
> me a 'read only' error. After building the system as described above, I
> reconfigured the PC so the Maxtor was wd0 and it would not boot (could not
> find a bootable disk). What does the install disk do that I am not doing?
>
> Note that other disks (e.g. Quantum LPS540A) do not seem to have this
> requirement. I can start at 0 and newfs works well.

Re 63 free sectors at the beginning of a i386 disk:
Are you giving the whole disk over to NetBSD? If so, you shouldn't need to
leave free space at the beginning, HOWEVER, some broken BIOSes seem to insist on
finding some sort of DOSish MBR partition information there. Are the BIOSes of
your 2 machines the same? ISTR Wolfgang Solfrank committed a fix for this, but
it won't be in 1.3.2.

> Please confirm that the primary boot code is installed in the disk label
> area. Is this area counted by disklabel?

I am not the person to confirm anything, but my understanding is that it
appears at the beginning of the NetBSD portion of the disk - usually 'a' and
'c' start at the same place...

> Is there an existing document I can read about all this magic?

http://cynjut.neonramp.com/FAQ_06

and the man pages...

It might be helpful if you mailed your disklabels.

Good luck,

Patrick