On Tue, Oct 12, 1999 at 11:43:06AM +0000, jiho wrote:
> Right now, it's a serious problem getting other OSes installed (the reason for 
> putting NetBSD beyond 8.4 BB).  DOS fdisk sees a 472.5 MB drive.  Linux fdisk 
> will only run if you let it wipe the drive and start over (although once 
> installed on a partition created by NetBSD fdisk, it does _seem_ to run fine).
> 
> I won't know for sure unless I redo everything from scratch, but my tentative 
> conclusion is:  Create your partitions on cylinder boundaries, even with this 
> new improved ability to boot using LBA.
> 
> The problem:  How?!?

I have installed a couple of my systems with 4 OSs (Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD
and NetBSD). What I did was install them exactly in that order. This was
on a 13G disk, so NetBSD was the top one, starting in the 9G ranges.
I had no problems if I installed them exactly in this order.

I did put everything on "cylinder boundaries" (BIOS-wise), but that
was more out of convenience. I computed the amount of space that I
wanted for each OS in advance, as the number of sectors in some
number of cylinders, and stuck to it.

Here's the fdisk output of one of them:

NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
cylinders: 16383 heads: 16 sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)

BIOS disk geometry:
cylinders: 1023 heads: 255 sectors/track: 63 (16065 sectors/cylinder)

Partition table:
0: sysid 5 (Extended partition)
    start 63, size 6361677 (3106 MB), flag 0x0
        beg: cylinder    0, head   1, sector  1
        end: cylinder  396, head   0, sector  1
1: sysid 130 (Linux swap or Prime or Solaris)
    start 6361740, size 6377805 (3114 MB), flag 0x80
        beg: cylinder  396, head   0, sector  1
        end: cylinder  793, head   0, sector  1
2: sysid 165 (FreeBSD or 386BSD or old NetBSD)
    start 12739545, size 6345675 (3098 MB), flag 0x0
        beg: cylinder  793, head   0, sector  1
        end: cylinder 1023, head 255, sector 63
3: sysid 169 (NetBSD)
    start 19085220, size 6365772 (3108 MB), flag 0x0
        beg: cylinder 1023, head 255, sector 63
        end: cylinder 1023, head 255, sector 63


[note: the first partition is just an extended partition containing
 the Linux stuff, that I had to scribble some bootcode into to
 make it bootable]

Hope this helps,

- Frank