On Fri, Jul 10, 1998 at 10:57:51AM -0700, Jonathan Stone wrote:
> >Which in fact means that the current 1.3 geometry system is crap.

First of all - sysinst is a great tool and which helps installing
NetBSD very much. I did not mean to offend anyone who worked on it,
but really appreciate the work on it. It is clearly the way to go. I
was frustrated when I wrote the mail(s), as I went through several
cycles of booting the install floppy, writing MBR etc, labeling disk,
installing sets and "No operating system found".

> That sounds painful.  But have you tried doing that with the 1.2
> install tools?  Do the 1.2 install tools do a better job of handling

No. I skipped the 1.2 line completly. My last full install was
probably at NetBSD1.0 (or even 0.9) the others were upgrades. 

> But there is, apparently, hardware out there which won't boot properly
> unless you have an "approved" geometry, and leave the first cylinder
> free.  That's quite aside from the impact on someone who installs
> NetbSD and subsequently decides to install a second OS on the disk.

Yes I understand. That's why I wrote to possibly have two choices.

> Perhaps so, but this was even *more* true with the old install method
> and the "take a pencil and paper and have a calculator handy"
> instructions.

Right. Here sysinst is real handy. Only the bios geometry thing is a
real problem (at least for me). When DOS fdisk can figure out what the
bios geometry is, why can't sysinst? I finally had to search a DOS
floppy, run fdisk and then install succeeded. 

As the system is up now and I have access over the net, I will try to
reconstruct my different failures. Perhaps this helps.

And as I said: I did not mean to offend anyone personally and I really
appreciate sysinst.

Good night.
 Heiko

-- 
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