Trying to install 1.3.3 on a 1-gig IDE disk (yes, there used to be disks
this small and even smaller ;-)

First problem I had: I specified the partition sizes in megabytes and
defined four partitions.  When I accepted the partitions, installer told
me two of them were overlapping.  I had set the offsets and sizes like
this:

partition	size	offset
/		100	0
swap		200	100
/usr		500	300
/var		300	800

I guess sysinst rounds the sector numbers or something and then gets a
different result for different partitions.  I had to edit the partition
sizes so that there was a 1-MB gap between the partitions to make things
work.

After this, I told it to continue.  For some reason, formatting / failed.
sysinst complained about a read-only filesystem.  Huh?

Then I typed "newfs /dev/wd0a" in shell and it worked.  I formatted all
partitions manually without problems.

Then I started sysinst again to let it do the rest of the install - but
how do I tell it that "the partitions are ok, just go ahead and do the
install now"?  I think there should be an option "use the partitions
already found on the disk".  Now, I had to enter the partition sizes
and offsets again.. then it tried to format / and failed again, argh.

sysinst is a very useful tool, but when something goes wrong, you're
completely lost.  I don't know why newfs fails now when run by the
installer and why it works just fine when I run it manually.  Anyway,
I just can't get NetBSD installed using sysinst on this disk. :-/

I guess the -current installer is better, but I'm not sure if I can
use it with 1.3.3..

  -jm