jcooper@icplanet.com (Jeremy Cooper) writes:
> A few months ago I wrote in asking for help for a friend who was trying to
> install NetBSD on a Shark that I had loaned him.  He was trying to install
> the OS onto an internal laptop IDE drive, but after the installation he was
> never able to boot from the drive.
> 
> [ See his original message at                                  ]
> [ http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-arm32/2000/03/10/0001.html ]

one thing i think i've mentioned to people who've asked about issues
like this in the past is, be sure to zero any MBR on the disk, if
you're going to install in 'raw disk', i.e. partition c starts at 0,
disklabel in block 1, etc.  (that'd be the default NetBSD/arm32
install.)

if i recall it goes something like this:

the ofw in the shark checks the MBR _first_, looking for a dos
partition to boot from, then the disklabel.

If it's a fresh disk, it probably has an MBR and a dos partition.  if
it tries to use it after you've stuffed data on it... it'll lose,
because there's nothing there in a format it recognizes and/or because
there's nothign there at all.  8-)


so, zero the first chunk of a new disk before you try to use it on a
shark.


maybe not your problem, but hopefully saying it again will help
somebody.  8-)


cgd