On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 04:15:49AM -0500, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> 
> > Yes and easy.  It (should) basically just work.
> > The netbsd boot selector code just sits in sector 0 of the disk.
> > Unlike lilo it doesn't load anything from anywhere else.
> > It will definitely load win98 (via DOS).
> > I've netbsd 1.5.2 and -current running with separate disklabels....
> 
> Linux might see a BSD slice as a quasi-extended partition and see the 
> subpartitions as logical partitions, but I don't know if it would work
> without an MBR reference.
> It might be practically impossible to install any DOS in such
> a quasi-logical partition.  An interesting experiment, though it might
> be like playing Evel Knievel with one's data.

RTFM....
The mbr (master boot record) in sector 0 defines 4 'partitions'.
Each has a byte that tell the system what sort of encoding (typically
a filesystem) is in that partition.
Most systems and OS will only boot one of these partition (by reading
then executing its first sector)

The 'extended' partition is a method of splitting one of the partitions
into smaller pieces.  DOS understands how the splitting works, Linux
uses this for its separate filesystems, swap etc.

NetBSD doesn't believe in anyone elses method of allocating space
on the disk.  You need a partition in order to boot something,
netbsd uses the second sector of the partition to describe the layout
of the entire disk.  Getting Linux to find the bits of a netbsd
system is probably impossible!

IMHO netbsd ought to have devices for a reasonable number of
partitions (following the extended ptn list) that do not use
the info from the netbsd disklabel.

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk