Excerpts from netbsd: 26-Mar-98 Booting 1.3 James Vodanovich Jim@bec (633*)

> I have a 486dx4 with a phonix bios 4.03 which reports
> missing operating system to any 1.3 disk hard or floppy. 
> (both IDE and SCSI tried.)
> 
> It will happily boot any 1.2 disk.

Is it really the message from the BIOS?
The original 1.3 boot floppy?
That's strange because the first stage startup of
1.2 and 1.3 boot is nearly identical.

> Is there a probelm if I install 1.3 on a drive with a 1.2 
> disklabel and boot records, for this machine. Or is 
> there another way around this.

You should be able to start a 1.3 kernel from a 1.2
bootsector. I'd however feel better if the problem could
be solved.
Another workaround could be to use a boot selector
on the harddisk.

best regards
Matthias