On Fri, Apr 21, 2000 at 04:29:15PM -0400, Terry Mathews wrote:
> My goal this weekend is to stop pussyfooting around and get NetBSD/1.4
> running on my i386 box so I can start work on setting up my WorkPad Z50.

If you need help with a first-time installation of NetBSD/i386, this is
the wrong list to be talking on. Try:

  netbsd-help (for beginners' questions like your disk query)
  port-i386 (for genuinely intel-specific questions)

Remember that NetBSD is different from Linux, and phrasing your questions
in an inflammatory way intended to illustrate how much easier it is to do
task X with Linux as opposed to NetBSD is unlikely to get you very far :)
If you want to participate in a fun flame war about the relative merits of
NetBSD and Linux you want

  netbsd-advocacy

For details on how to subscribe, try:

  http://www.netbsd.org/MailingLists/

For all kinds of hints and tips, try:

  http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/

Also, see the following manual pages:

  disklabel(8)
  fdisk(8)
  mbrlabel(8)

If you don't have a running NetBSD installation on which to view these
pages, try:

  http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?manpath=NetBSD

As a hint, you are probably used to Linux's approach of building one
filesystem per partition. The BSD's don't work like that -- typically
you create a single DOS partition for the operating system on a single disk,
and within that partition you use disklabel to create slices. Each slice
might be a swap area, or a place to build filesystem.

So what you probably want to do with your new disk is (a) use fdisk to
create a DOS partition on it for NetBSD, (b) use disklabel to create slices
on that partition, (c) use newfs to build filesystems on your slices
and (d) edit fstab to arrange them to be mounted somewhere next time you
boot.


Good luck,


Joe