<RANT>
I have never trusted this practice of spoofing the disk geometry to access
every last sector. HD manufacturers put that slosh in for _some_ reason,
maybe it's not always a good reason, but they wouldn't waste 4 megs out of
3 gigs just because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

With SCSI disks at least, you know that all bad-block reassignment takes
an incredible amount of hand-holding from the host side software, so it's
pretty safe to claim those trailing sectors. But what about IDE?

Overly smart low-level heuristics are the hallmark of what we all love to
hate about the PC hardware market. This is exactly the kind of thing that
would be lying in wait to burn an unsuspecting user.
</RANT>

> For the 3,2GB I did the same thing. After the first "newfs wd1c", I got
> a message telling me that I was wasting 8064 sectors of the disk. I
> added 8064 to the number 6281856 which was the size I had entered for my
> C-partition on this disk, and tried to do a new disklabel. 

Did you alter your geometry information as well? Perhaps a sector "outside"
the disklabel's geometry causes internal problems in the filesystem code.

> I have booted MSDOS and done a "fdisk" on the disk, including
> formatting, this has gone well, but it doesn't help; NetBSD will not
> boot with this disk enabled.

I think your best bet is to zero-wipe that disk or hard-format it, to remove
the magic bits that make NetBSD think there is a label on it. Most modern
disks don't actually re-format themselves, because it would take hours. If
the NetBSD area starts at the same cylinder, then it's probably just finding
the old disklabel and getting all confused again, no matter how many times
you use the DOS utilities.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com