Hi,

I am new to NetBSD on the i386 side, although I have done several installs
on the mac68k architecture. I am not new to PC hardare though as I have
installed BSDI numerous times (1.1 through 3.0) and FreeBSD a few times
(2.2 and 3.0). 

The hardware: HP Vectra XM Series 3 P90, 80MB of RAM, and a brand spanking
new Quantum Fireball 4.3 GB HD (EIDE). It also has video and Ethernet on
the motherboard. 

I read through the INSTALL document a few times.  I popped in the boot
floppy for 1.3-RELEASE and booted away. 

Problem 1: MSDOS and NetBSD cannot share the HD:

According to the on screen instructions, I am supposed to be able to
create both BSD and MSDOS partitions.  However, no matter what I try to
do, I can only get 1 partition of 280MB in size. I tried manually setting
the geometry, and all other suggestions, but no luck. The only way to make
the disk usable was to make it NetBSD only. This is OK, since I don't
really about having a DOS partition that much. Just for fun, I tried it
using the FreeBSD 2.2.5 boot floppy and I was able to partition it easily
into MSDOS and FreeBSD partitions, so I think it is a problem with  
NetBSD's sysinst.  There is no mention of whether you need to first
partition the disks with fdisk or some other utility.

Problem 2: Must download all tarballs EVEN IF you are not installing them
all.

Having successfully created a NetBSD partiton and divided it up into the
following slices:

    150MB /
    200MB swap
    700MB /usr
    400MB /home
   2660MB /usr/local

I proceeded with the install. I had downloaded all the tar files except
games.tgz and placed them on my IBM Thinkpad which is running FreeBSD
3.0.  I was able to configure the on-board Ethernet on my HP and tried to
install via FTP to my Thinkpad. The installation process ALWAYS died when
it came to the part where it expected to find games.tgz.  So I had to
download games.tgz even though I did not want to.  Once I did download the
games.tgz file, the install went ahead and gave me the choice of whether I
wanted to download games or not. Why not give the choice first and then
just check for the files needed to the modules that the user selects?

Problem Three: The distribution tarballs or the tar program is corrupt.

After the install, I noticed that some files were missing, especially
files that should be in the comp.tgz tarball. I took all the tarballs and
did a 

   tar ztvf ###.tgz 

to list out the files. On most of the files, at some point, I get a "CRC
error" for the files. The same occurs if I just try to gunzip the file. 

Having just had an ISDN line installed, I decided to redownload all the
tarballs and try again. All the datestamps and file sizes are exactly as
they shoudl be on the server. Ecen the checksums match up. But when I try
to untar or gunzip the files, I get the CRC error. Since I cannot compile
anything (any attempt to compile ends with a "cc1 error"), my system is
basically worthless to me.

As much as I wanted to run NetBSD, I am afraid that I must now move over
to FreeBSD. By the way, 2.2.5 installed without a hitch.

   Mark Andres               E-mail: mark@giganet.net
          Running NetBSD, 100% Microsoft Free!
   Me & NetBSD: http://www2.giganet.net/~mark/NetBSD/