Hi,

I just checked in a change that hopefully makes installations of NetBSD
starting at the very first sector of a disk work with more (if not all)
BIOSs.

The problem, as I just found out with a new motherboard I had to install,
was that some BIOSs try to deduce the geometry a disk was installed with
from the partition table, and obviously that went wrong with the old
parameters.  The symptom was that the machine would hang immediately
after detecting the disks, way before it tried to boot.  I.e. you
couldn't even boot from floppy after you had installed NetBSD this way.

The change I made was reducing the faked partition size in the NetBSD
boot code to only 16 sectors.  These 16 sectors will fit on the first track
with all disks, so the c/h/s values are the same, independent of the
geometry the disk uses.  Note that this faked partition entry isn't
normally used for anything at all.  It is only here in case some BIOS
insists that the first sector contains a partition table.

For the record, if you install NetBSD as the only OS on a disk, and start
the NetBSD partition at the very first sector, the bios geometry is
totally irrelevant during the installation.

Could people interested in installing NetBSD with this setup please
test this on their machines and report back any problems they might
have?  Thanks.

Ciao,
Wolfgang
-- 
ws@TooLs.DE     (Wolfgang Solfrank, TooLs GmbH) 	+49-228-985800