In message <200007011244.IAA23946@funhouse.com>, "John F. Woods" writes:

>> > I need this for my 5th msdos partition.
>> This sounds as though you're talking about partitions in the MBR, not
>> partitions in the (NetBSD) disklabel, in which case the limit is 4, not
>> 8, and as far as I know cannot in practice be altered.
>
>I seem to recall that DOS has a hack where the 4th MBR partition can be
>given its own MBR table, extending the number of DOS partitions to 7.

Right -- you can set up an "extended partition" (I think that's what 
the term is), and have some number -- a large number, I thought -- of 
partitions within it.  Linux can use these, but on Linux each of its 
partitions has to correspond to a DOS partition.
>
>It seems unfortunate that NetBSD/i386 shares (to some small degree) DOS's
>inability to gracefully handle large disk drives.  (I have a 20GB disk which
>has been gathering dust for a month because I haven't had the time to build
>a new kernel -- my backup tape drive uses 4GB tapes, you see, so I prefer to
>limit partitions to 4GB; and since I also like to have a small root
>partition (one without a lot of changing files) and don't need 4GB of swap,
>that runs over the budget of 6 useful partitions.)
>
>In fact, while I'm on the topic of large disk partitions, does anyone know
>offhand what kind of gotchas are involved with large disks?  As I vaguely
>recall, huge cylinder sizes (as may be needed to get a disk to play nicely
>with DOS) requires large block sizes due to some limit in the geometry
>calculations (but it's been quite a while since I set up any disks, so I
>don't remember).
>
There can be *lots* of problems, especially with the BIOS.  Various 
generations of PC hardware have had problems with disks over 512M, 2G, 
4G, 8G (this latter is quite common in 2-year-old BIOSes), I think 37G, 
and something around 137G.

If you want dual boot between NetBSD and DOS with or without a GUI, you 
should make sure that Mr. Bill's OS is fully addressable by the BIOS.  
The same is likely true for / on NetBSD, so that it can boot.  Past 
that -- well, you may have to lie to the NetBSD partitioning stuff, but 
like you it's been too long since I did it.  On the other hand, I 
recently went through *serious* anguish trying to set up a laptop with a 
big disk for BSD/OS.  Disk setup, in my opinion, runs neck-and-neck 
with X setup for sheer incomprehensible pain.

		--Steve Bellovin