On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, Andy Wingate wrote:
> Sebastian Maus wrote:
> > On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, David Brownlee wrote:
> > > > Yes bb_riscbsd needs to report a positive value and then write
> > > > this value into a spare slot in the filecore bootblock. I don't
> > > > know if this is F+ compatible as I am still running with RISCOS
> > > > 3.7. Has anyone got NetBSD installed on the same disk as a RISC
> > > > OS4/F+ filecore format partition? bb_riscbsd is BASIC perhaps
> > > > the maths just overflows for 2GB+ partitions so needs a little
> > > > tweaking.
> > >
> > > 	Ack.. another thing to try to get fixed for 1.5 :)
> >
> > Almost a year ago I installed NetBSD on the one and only hard disc
> > in my RISC PC, which was E+ (commonly called F+) formatted. I also
> > saw the negative numbers bb_riscbsd presented but I had enough
> > courage to test it nonetheless as I had made backups before. It did
> > its job and both partitions seem OK. So there's probably just a
> > problem with displaying the values. On the other hand, the return
> > values of some SWIs could have changed to cope with larger discs. By
> > the way, it was a hard job figuring out how to install NetBSD 1.4 on
> > an Acorn. Upgrading from 1.3 was much easier. I'm looking forward to
> > the first release of 1.5.
>
> I'd previous only dared to format my filecore partition to 2Gb having
> heard bad things about NetBSD not being best pleased if it was larger.
> This worked fine with E and E+ but last night I found myself short of
> space so repartitioned my drive to an even 4Gb:4Gb split. I was then
> left with Part_info giving me negative numbers but decided to trust my
> knowledge of the number of cylinders when using BB_RiscBSD. I then
> installed the shiny new CD without any troubles, except the odd
> display glitches due to the non-vt100 thing.

Excellent, nice to know that the CD worked for at least one person :)

hmm, I wonder if there's an extension to one of the risc os calls to give 
this info.  Another thing for the list of stuff to ask riscos ltd.

Cheers,
Chris