Subject: Re: Almost there on z50...
To: Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com>
From: Robert J Taylor <thetaylorfamily@earthlink.net>
List: port-hpcmips
Date: 04/15/2000 21:01:20
On Sat, 15 Apr 2000, Todd Whitesel wrote:
> > And I cannot seem to use "unmounted fs" or "local dir"
> ...
> >> At this point I'm confused. How do I access the DOS partition? That's where
> > my distribution sets are.
> 
> At this month's South Bay Area NetBSD User's Group Meeting (actually, five of
> us at a Round Table Pizza), we helped Mike Cheponis install his PC laptop and
> it was a lot like this: no network, tgz files on MS-DOS partition.

Round Table is the best pizza -- depending on location. (Sorry, off-topic).

> It was nasty. We had to determine the correct numbers for the MS-DOS partition
> and then suspend (control-Z) sysinst at about the point where you got stuck.
> Then we used "disklabel -e" to add a partition to the BSD part of the disk
> so that "mount -t msdos /dev/wd0f /mnt2" would work. (This invokes 'ed' which
> fortunately, Erik Berls remembered how to use 'blind' without any man pages
> whatsoever.)

Hmmm. What did Erik type in ed? i noticed that the /.profile use ed as the
editor, I wonder if vi could be substituted?

> Once we had the new partition in the disklabel, we used "fg" to get back into
> sysinst and used "unmounted fs" to proceed, and it finished without incident.

This I will try. (Unfortunately my Xircom has still not arrived...although my
2nd Workpad z50 has).

> So while it is certainly possible, it is definitely not for the faint of heart.

How about the slow of mind? ;)

> Since the process is actually very straightforward for C code, there really
> is no reason why sysinst could not have an option to mark certain MS-DOS
> partitions so that matching partitions will be added to the NetBSD disklabel.
> It also would help lots of newbies on PC's, because one of the first questions
> they ask is "how do I mount my FAT partitions?"

That's me: a newbie from the world of PCs (well, I've been an
business application programmer on a number of UNIX's platforms: AT&T SysV on
an NCR Tower, SCO XENIX(*shudder*) and UNIX, DEC UNIX on an alpha (my first
64bit experience), Linux 2.0/2.2; oh, and, of course, Coherent back in '92 on my
CompuAdd 386-40) and my first question is as you predicted.  Only once have I
setup a *NIX system from the ground up, and that was a SCO UNIX / Informix
installation on a new machine that was pretty uneventful.

Thanks for your reply, assistance, warning, and attempt to rally the troops to
my (the newbie's) cause. 

> Todd Whitesel
> toddpw @ best.com

Robert Taylor