The good news is that I now have a NetBSD bootloader that runs
under RISCOS 4. The bad news is that it does not get me very
far as the kernel cannot find the NetBSD partition on my hard
disk.
    
When I installed RISCOS 4 I changed my RISCOS disk format
to the new F+ format. It looks as though this has overwritten
the boot block on the disk and has lost my NetBSD partition.
It appears to me that RISCOS does not have a parition table as
such and all there is is a pointer to the start of a non-RISCOS
portion of the disk in the boot block. Reinstating the pointer
is going to be amusing...
 
Before considering surgery on the boot block, I would like to see
an example of one that is correctly set up for NetBSD. If anyone
could send me a hex dump of the boot block from their RiscPC hard
disk I would be grateful. The boot block is found at sector 6 on
track 0 of cylinder 0 and you can read it using Zap.
   
I guess that the boot block issue also explains why UnixFS does
not work with RISCOS 4.
 
Obviously the updated bootloader is going to have to be tested on
other machines to ensure that it works on configurations different
to mine and for backwards compatibility with RISCOS 3.5, 3.6 and
3.7. If anyone would like to try it out, could they let me know?
 
Once the modified bootloader works to everybody's satisfaction,
how do I go about contributing my updated version to the NetBSD
project?
  
Dave Daniels
 
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