On Wed, 20 Jan 1999, Mason Loring Bliss wrote:

> I can boot from the disk, I should say... I'm saying partition "e" exists
> because it showed up in my disklabel output. However, it didn't show up
> as type "MSDOSFS" or "MSDOS" or anything like that...
> 
> Now things are different, however. After running mbrlabel, things look like:
:
:
> > Try this
> > 
> > disklabel >/etc/disklabels/SAMSUNG
> > disklabel -R -r wd0 /etc/disklabels/SAMSUNG #writes an initial label
> > 
> > That will take care of the "no disklabel" message.
> 
> Will that be destructive with regard to my being able to boot into (blech)
> W98? I'm not sure exactly where our (i386) disklabels live, physically, and
> I don't want to overwrite anything the Evil Empire's OS holds dear. (At least,
> not until I can run Diablo under NetBSD.)

Generally no, but there are no guarantees. It might behoove you to
save your mbr to a file, first, with rawrite.exe, or, from within
NetBSD, save the whole first cylinder (or two) with "dd if=/dev/wd0d
bs=8k count=4 >THIS" (or count=8).  For safety, use "conv=notrunc" on
restore, else dd may pad, which would really screw up your dos
partiton. It goes without saying that you would never want to restore
that into the dos partition anytime after you've booted into dos.

Do you still get the "no disklabel" message? If not, and "disklabel
-r"  returns something, the damage has already been done. If you still
haven't put down a disklabel, perhaps caution is dictated. Have you
tried calling "mount_msdos" directly? I've had better luck at times,
doing that over "mount -t msdos." Also, mount_msdos(1) spells out a
few options that aren't available with mount.

> Eek... Hm. Is it possible that the blecherous lot in Redmond has done some-
> thing different with Windows 98 such that W98-generated partitions aren't
> recognized as such by other OSes?

Wouldn't know. What does "fdisk wd0" say?