On Sat, Apr 09, 2005 at 10:40:10PM +0200, oliverfuchs@onlinehome.de wrote:
> On Sat, 09 Apr 2005, oliverfuchs@onlinehome.de wrote:
> 
> > 2.0 neither from installed bootselector on wd0 (it gives me the
> > message "no operating system" and then directly "press any key to
> > reboot") nor from the installation cd with boot hd1a:).
> 
> Oh sorry, that was wrong:
> Installing the bootselector on wd0  gives me error message "3".
> Chqanging the bios to boot directly on second harddisk gave me the
> above mentioned error message - sorry for that.

You do need to be absolutely explicit when reporting error messages.
Sometimes it is even worth patching an error message just to be sure
you are getting the text from the place you expect it.

Let us assume you are getting the 'Error 3' message from NetBSD mbr_bootsel
code.  That is output if the mbr code doesn't like the contents of the pbr
sector it read.  It can't do many checks (lack of space).  The actual
checks are 'first byte non-zero, last two bytes 0x55, 0xaa.

You can check the contents of the pbr with:
    dd if=/dev/rwd0d skip=63 count=1|hexdump -C
It should match the start of /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv1

Now, if you didn't put the root filesystem at the start of the netbsd
partition all bets are off.....

	David

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