>Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 20:51:58 +0900 (JST)
>From: Mark Andres <mark@giganet.net>

>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.

Yes, if you want to share a disk between MSDOS and NetBSD you have to
use fdisk to create a DOS MBR, and create DOS and NetBSD partitions in
it.

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

>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?

I guess sysinst assumes that the FTP site has the full distribution.
You probably could have worked around this by creating a zero-length
games.tar.gz file on your HP.

Note that 1.3 is the first release to use the sysinst tool, so it has
many sharp edges which need to be polished off.  FreeBSD's tools have
been around longer, and also can be simpler because they only have to
deal with a single architecture.

>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. 

>From where did you get the tarballs?  I noticed when I installed 1.3
that the comp.tgz tarball I got from one of the mirrors was corrupt,
but when I got it from ftp.netbsd.org it was fine.  I informed the
maintainer of the mirror and it should be fixed by now.  However, that
doesn't mean it couldn't have become corrupted again, or maybe you got
it from a different mirror which isn't yet aware that it may be
corrupt.
-- 
Mike Long <mikel@shore.net>                http://www.shore.net/~mikel
"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands,
hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -- H.L. Mencken