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.
> 
> 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.)
> 

Ok, at the prompt type 
#EDITOR=vi
#export EDITOR

and now disklabel -e uses vi. ;)

> 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.
> 
> So while it is certainly possible, it is definitely not for the faint of heart.
> 
> 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?"
> 
> Todd Whitesel
> toddpw @ best.com

Robert Taylor