My i386 NetBSD 1.0 system failed to boot yesterday. At the point where
the boot messages should have started to appear there was nothing, and
after a little delay the system reset itself and tried again -
repeatedly.

I had recently reinstalled using less of my disk in order to make room
for Linux, which I also want to try out, and I had had a few
(apparently) successful sessions under the new regime. The only thing
that I had done differently was to allocate the entire NetBSD
partition to the root partition and have swap use an external
partition that I plan to share with Linux.

As I had already decided that I still hadn't quite got the setup to my
satisfaction I wasn't too bothered about embarking on yet another
installation. However, when the process gets to making the filesystems
I now get these errors reported

Labelling disk wd0...wd0 cannot find label (no disk label)
newfs: ioctl:(WDINFO) : no such process
newfs: /dev/rwd0a: can't rewrite disk label

but otherwise the installation appears to go ahead OK. Maybe not
unexpectedly when I run disklabel with the -r flag the cpg field for
the 4.2BSD partitions is 0 rather than 16 without.

I've reverted the NetBSD partition to DOS, run format and scandisk
over it without any obvious problems, and subsequently tried
reinstalling NetBSD at different places on the disk, but all with the
same result, i.e. the disk label fails to get written and I can't
boot from disk.

What can have gone wrong, and more importantly how can I get NetBSD
working again?

Jim
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J.K.Wight@newcastle.ac.uk
Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Tel: +44 191 222 8238
Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom.             Fax: +44 191 222 8232