So, let me get this straight....

The man page for fdisk is _ahead_ of the program?

That's a switch.

The man page describes -b and -B options, which let one redefine the BIOS 
geometry and edit the boot menu, respectively.  But when you try to use those 
options, the program prints a "usage" line that does not show them, and exits.

So, how does one go about doing those things?

During installation (using the booted floppies), one has the opportunity to 
change the BIOS geometry and edit the boot menu.  How does the install program 
do that, if fdisk doesn't have the options shown in the man page?

I want to change the BIOS geometry because it got fouled up somehow.  The 
installation got it right the first time, at 255 heads.  Now it's 15 heads.  
Yes, I ran the DOS fdisk, but I've run that without incident on this drive, 
since installing NetBSD and its boot menu.  (That's the BIOS geometry, what 
would DOS do to it?)

I tried to install Linux.  The Linux fdisk complained about a "corrupt" 
partition table.  The only choices were to wipe the whole thing out, or abort. 
 Obviously I aborted.  Lovely.

NetBSD still boots and runs fine, by the way.  It just reports wrong geometry.

It's beginning to look like NetBSD must be installed last, after all other 
OSes have been installed on the drive.  That's a problem, because I want to be 
able to change the OS on at least one of the other partitions.  That's why I 
want to be able to edit the boot menu.

I never had these problems before because I used os-bs for a boot menu, on a 
smaller drive.  But of course, os-bs doesn't know the extended BIOS call 
required to boot from beyond 1024 cylinders.


--Jim Howard  <jiho@mail.c-zone.net>