Subject: Re: New HD on old machine
To: None <port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: Chris Baird <abuse@brushtail.apana.org.au>
List: port-i386
Date: 01/03/2000 00:56:27
Claudio Leite,
 > I'm getting a 8.4GB EIDE drive for a Pentium 60 without any LBA or
 > large disk support in the BIOS. [...] The drive will be 100%
 > NetBSD, no other systems will be installed.

Although the disk will be all-NetBSD, how about partitioning the drive so
that the first is BIOS-friendly and bootable?

My machine has the same size drive, divided into four primary partitions.
The first is NetBSD's wd0a; the second is swap; the third and fourth have
Linux and Hurd, although I have these mounted in NetBSD too.  If you make
the first primary partition/root drive small enough to keep the BIOS
happy, the rest can be mounted via /etc/fstab later.  The BIOS "drive C"
settings would then be set to just the details of the first partition.

I installed by letting sysinst take the whole first partition for NetBSD,
and after finishing the installation (fortunately I had enough memory not
to need swap), I used the output from fdisk(8) to reedit the disklabel
and fill in the other partitions' details so that:
    wd0a - the range of the first primary partition
    wd0b - the range of the second primary partition (swap)
    wd0c - (as wd0a)
    wd0d - the range of the whole disk
    wd0f - the range of the third primary partition
    wd0g - the range of the fourth primary partition

And your fstab would resemble:
    /dev/wd0a / ffs rw 1 1
    /dev/wd0b none swap sw 0 0
    /dev/wd0f /usr ffs rw 0 1
    /dev/wd0g /usr/home ffs rw 0 2

This also allows you to install other operating systems into wd0f/wd0g,
and share the swap partition...

-- 
Chris Baird,, <cjb@brushtail.apana.org.au>