Greetings NetBSD users, I want to personally thank each and every person
who spent the time to offer suggestions on how I might get NetBSD & WinNT
to co-exist on a PC containing a single huge EIDE disk drive.

     In a nutshell, all Microsoft operatoring systems cannot directly
access more than 1024 cylinders of an (E)IDE drive.  Not even Windows NT 4.0
with its NTFS is capable of this, dispite rumors to the contrary.  (I
*REALLY* tried!)  In addition, bootable slices should be placed within what
the bios thinks is the first 1024 cylinders.  The only disk translation that
NetBSD can use is LBA, and NetBSD cannot use any other disk translation
software (such as IBM's disk overlayer) or hardware.  (Microsoft operating
systems can use most, if not all, of the disk translation software &
hardware.)  And Microsoft operating systems cannot directly handle disk
geometry with more than 16 heads or more than 63 sectors (per track) without
some type of bios support (like LBA); this is referred to as the 528 MB
barrier.  (Whereas NetBSD is happy with whatever real or fake disk geometry
you use, from 1-128 heads & 1-255 cylinders, as long as you enter the values
into the bios so that it can use it during its boot.)

     With all this in mind, there are two methods of getting NetBSD to
co-exist with WinNT on a PC with a single huge EIDE drive:

1) Use the real geometry, without translation, and put your entire WinNT
        slice(s) and the root partition of your NetBSD slice within the
        first 1024 cylinders (528 MB) of your disk.  The remainder of your
        NetBSD slice can go on the remaining (> 1023) cylinders of the
        disk.

2) Use LBA so that you have in a virtual sense less than 1024 cylinders,
        which means that you can put your WinNT & NetBSD slices and
        partitions anywhere you want, and still be able to put off them.

I've tried both solutions (1) & solution (2), on a bios that supports LBA,
and I can testify that they both worked.  :-)  I've also tried various other
solutions on a bios that doesn't support LBA, and none of them worked.  :-(

     Unfortunately, solution (1) is unacceptable to me, since I wish to
use a lot more than 528 MB on my WinNT slice.  And solution (2) is also
unacceptable to me, since I plan to use that disk on a high powered 486
VLB motherboard, and I don't have enough left over cash at this time to
replace the motherboard, cache, ram, and specialized VLB cards, with a
with a newer, PCI, Pentium type system that supports LBA.  To make
matters worse, NetBSD doesn't even boot with my Promise 2300+ EIDE VLB
controler, which contains its own LBA disk bios, but thats another
posting.

Thanks again for your suggestions.  I certainly learned a lot about EIDE
disks.  (Next time, I'm buying SCSI.)  ;^)  Sincerely, Alicia.
_____
 Name: Alicia da Conceicao         Bus: Media-City                  _
Email: alicia@media-city.com       WWW: http://www.media-city.com  | |-+ /
Phone: 905-507-2440, 416-239-6875  Fax: 905-851-0844               | | | \__/
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