Wondering about the old "Installboot Old BPB is too big" issue

[Adrian Christiansen <adrian.christiansen%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hi guys!

Happy about NetBSD 7.0 being RC1!

So I'm trying it out on every different machine I have, starting with
this amd64 AMD Sempron 64 +3600 box. Which have an IDE drive (wd0).
And using the sysinst generated disklabel with, partition "a" having
an offset of 63 (it's at the start of the disk). Installboot gives me
this error:

installboot: Old BPB too big, use -f (may invalidate filesystem)
installboot: Set bootstrap operation failed

However, if I run installboot by hand with -f on the disk with the
sysinst auto-generated disklabel. It results in a Bootable system.

But since I assume it is incorrect to just use -f and be happy about
it, I set the MBR partition to start at 1MB in sysinst (looking at the
disk with fdisk, it starts at block 2048). This will result in sysinst
auto-generating a disklabel that with partiton "a" having an offset
2048. All is good and this time installboot runs without any
complaints, and the system boots just fine.

So my question is if the secondary bootxx_ffsv2 bootloader is too big,
or if installboot is getting confused by something? Perhaps more
likely, have I just confused something?


Cheers!,
Adrian.