>  Today I hooked up a new hard drive to my Pentium machine.  Drive is for

[This should be posted to port-i386@NetBSD.ORG, then.  Followups redirected.]

> NetBSD only.  Thought all I had to do is to edit a disklabel and write that
> one.  Disklabel reports me that there is an illegal DOS partition without
> NetBSD-id.  The drive was never been partitioned under DOS, nor does
> DOS-fdisk report any partitions.

Undoubtedly because it's a "new hard drive", yes?

>  I was lucky that I had a copy of the disklabel for the new drive, because
> on reboot the disklabel was empty and thus no partition found.
> Resurrecting the partitions was easy.

How could you "resurrect" something that was brand new?

>  My question:  What am I supposed to do before/while hooking a new drive?
> Is "pfdisk" the answer for all new drives, even if for NetBSD-only?

I believe so.  Our PC had a single 2.1 Gb DOS-only disk on it, and I added
a 2.1 Gb Seagate to it fresh out of the box.  Since I was doing a fresh
install, maybe it was easier, since that mandates running "pfdisk" and
assigning a "NetBSD"-tagged partition, etc.  Once I did that, I rebooted from
the 1.1 boot floppies and away I went.  No problems.

	- Greg