In article <36B37261.6E58D9CC@geocities.com>,
Chris Ewert <radio_1@geocities.com> wrote:
>I am tring to install NetBSD-1.3.3 on a computer with a 10.1 Gig
>harddisk and a 5.5 Windows partition.  The NetBSD partition (type ID 165
>(right?) is partition 2 and should be approximently 4 gigs.  and the
>other partition shows up as 5852 megs (which is correct).  However when
>I am running the sysinstall program the NetBSD partition comes to be a
>maximum of 2 gigs (it shows the MSDOS partition of 5825 mb (11984427
>sectors offset 63).  When I was prompted for the disk geometry and
>information the BIOS read a little over 1024 cylinders.  It would not
>let me keep that number so I had to say 1024.  I got some type of error
>when it was writing out the superblocks in newfs.  I cannot mount any of
>the partitions when I boot now.  Any ideas?  Has this been seen before?
>Also I noticed that the Real geometry was 16 times the cylinders with 16
>heads, the other option was also this, so I just went with real.
>
As much as we try, it seems that sysinst will never be able to fully deal
with all the possible permutations of mbr vs. disklabel vs. bios setups
in the i386 world.

The solution I found to work with >8.4g drives was:
1. Use DOS FDISK to create an extended partition taking up the netbsd
section of the disk (i.e. all but the space taken by the primary Windows
partition).  Do not create any logical drives in it.

2. Boot the NetBSD-1.3.3 install kernel.  Suspend sysinst (^Z).

3. Use fdisk -u -a to change the extended partition to type 169 (new
NetBSD), leaving all other parameters for it the same as they were.**  Also
set this partition active so that when you reboot after sysinst finishes
you will boot back into NetBSD.

** note that after you do this some of the resulting values may look strange
(as, for example, the ending cylinder value may have wrapped around).  Don't
worry about this, it's the size in sectors that counts, and you should have
just left this the same as it was)

4. resume sysinst (fg).  You should now be able to continue through the
standard install procedure, using only part of the disk, using the defaults
in most cases.

Hopefully this should get you through.  If you have any trouble with this,
talk to me tomorrow at church.

jdarrow

--
John Darrow
Computing Services, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL
John.P.Darrow@wheaton.edu