A week or two ago, I asked you folks what to do about "medium errors" that
had cropped up on our 486DX/33 NetBSD system.  I got lots of useful answers,
and would like to thank everyone for their input.

Eventually, we decided to solve the problem in this manner: we re-hooked up
the system's original 124 Mb IDE disk, and after making careful backups of
both the DOS/Windows partitions and the NetBSD partitions (modulo the bad
spot on the disk, which was in the NetBSD root partition )-: ), we decided
that we'd re-do the whole system from scratch.

So we formatted the IDE disk and decided to make that an all-DOS C: disk, and
we did this and restored the old C: from the backup tape.  We then could boot
DOS and so at this point, we ran Adaptec's "SCSIFMT" to re-format the SCSI
disk (a Seagate 1.06 Gb drive).  That done, we then decided that we wanted
to re-do the partitioning, so we changed it from being 0-10 Mb DOS12, 10-210
Mb DOSex, and 210-1004 Mb for NetBSD to 0-400 Mb DOSex for the new D: disk for
DOS, and I was to have the remaining 605 Mb for restoring NetBSD onto.

We then restored the old D: onto this newly-repartitioned setup and all went
well, so I was all set to try and figure out how to get a minimal NetBSD
boot up and running so I could restore my existing setup (1.0) from the
backup tape.

I immediately ran into this quandary, which must be a FAQ but I searched the
port-i386 Gopher archives in vain:

If you have an IDE drive that DOS uses for C: and a SCSI drive, how do you
boot NetBSD?

In the old SCSI-only setup this was trivial; I just ran "OS-BS" and set up
the 2 bootable partitions in a menu, and no trouble at all.

With this new setup, I run "OS-BS" and it promptly decides that it is going
to only modify the boot sector(s?) on the IDE disk, and thus it promptly
tells me that I have a disk with 1 partition and the other 3 empty, and how
might I like to set up a boot menu using this one partition?

Well, gee, that doesn't help me much!  What to do?  If you have an IDE drive,
it seems like the machine only wants to boot from that.  Even if I could run
OS-BS on the SCSI (say, for example, I temporarily disconnected the IDE and
ran "OS-BS" from a DOS bootable floppy), I don't see how I can tell the
machine (or OS-BS) that I want it to check both disks for bootable partition
candidates.

Is there any solution, or is there no choice but to ditch the IDE if we want
to be able to boot NetBSD?  I suppose the only other solution would be to
make the C: partition be on the SCSI and make the IDE D:, but that's not
optimal space-wise for one, and this thing *really* likes the IDE when it
sees it out there.

If there's a solution for this, I'd really appreciate hearing it!  I read
Martin Husemann's partitioning guide but that wasn't applicable in this case.

Thanks,

	- Greg

P.S. Please at least cc: me if you override my Reply-To: header as I'm (still)
     not on the "port-i386" list ...