> Which in fact means that the current 1.3 geometry system is crap.

In the installer, it definitely is. Once you manage to get the partitions and
disklabel set up just right, things work very well. But that's a big leap on
some systems.

> In the old 1.0 days I installed a system with a 1GB disk without exactly
> knowing what I am doing and it booted fine from that SCSI disk.
> Now with 1.3* I am struggling real hard with the system to get it booting
> from a 100MB disk that happens to have 1200 cylinders *sigh*

I can sympathize here.

With 1.2 it kept wanting to trash my disk, because the BIOS' idea of my
NetBSD partition actually started one head's worth of sectors into what I
thought was the partition, and this was because of the commercial disk
partition program (OnTrack Disk Manager) that I had originally used to set
up my DOS partition map. But once I knew what sector numbers to type in,
the 1.2 installer worked great.

However with 1.3 it doesn't know how to deal with BIOS geometries that cannot
see the whole NetBSD area. Most of the time. I stumbled on a code path that
causes it to recognize the whole disk anyway. I forget exactly what it is at
the moment; I'm trying to clear out a block of free time to just reinstall my
1.3.2 from scratch and take copious notes. I've looked at the sysinst source
quite a bit by now, and it really could use some work. If we're going to have
a 1 megabyte sysinst and use curses, the least we should do is USE curses to
support real data entry and status. Right now it's mostly a parade of menus.

> While this compatibility thing with other OS etc. is nice if you 
> want to use more than one OS on disk, it is crap when using the entire
> disk for NetBSD.

This is fixable. Other than the small overhead, there is nothing fundamentally
bogus about having a DOS MBR/partition-map on all our i386 disks. I prefer it,
actually, because when I am trying to diagnose things from the DOS side, all
my disks show up as something sensible, and programs like the win95 installer
do not decide that they are unformatted and should be 'fixed' for me. (!!)

In fact I plan to begin putting two small floppy-sized partitions at the
front of my NetBSD-only disks: a DOS partition for the utilities and boot
manager, and an image of the install disk. I'd like to be able to take the
disk to a friend's house and get NetBSD installed from my local copies of
the tarballs without needing any floppies whatsoever. Eventually this should
become a bootable CD-ROM, assuming I can get mkisofs/cdrecord to work with
my HP 6020.

> And - for user that are even less experienced than me - this is a reason
> to abort the NetBSD install and try another *BSD or Linux.

Agreed. I bought a FreeBSD book just to get ideas from their installer. I
already have plenty of ideas from the old SunOS install CDs (not the unclean
solaris2 lets-load-openblow-from-cd-and-chew-up-billable-hours installer).

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com