On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 06:38:57PM +0100, wojtek@wojtek.from.pl wrote:
> maybe i've sid it unclear:
> 
> look at this (my home machine):
> 
> a is root / partition , b is swap, no more real partitions for netbsd.
> 
> because i want swap to be near beginning of disk (faster) and disk is 20GB
> i made partition e ONLY to hold "boot" file. boot itself can load kernel
> from anywhere (looks like BIOS supports extended int13 commands).
> 
> this works:
> 
> 8 partitions:
> #        size   offset     fstype   [fsize bsize   cpg]
>   a: 38909556  1101744     4.2BSD      512  4096    24   # (Cyl. 1093 - 39693*)
>   b:   295144   806600       swap                        # (Cyl.  800*- 1092)
>   c: 39204900   806400     unused        0     0         # (Cyl.  800 - 39693*)
>   d: 40011300        0     unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 39693*)
>   e:      200   806400     4.2BSD     1024  8192    16   # (Cyl.  800 - 800*)
>   f:   806337       63      MSDOS                        # (Cyl.    0*- 799)
> 
> 
> but i've tried to put bootstrap to e partition raw (with -b option in
> installboot). i've made partition e beginning from 806404 (to not overlab
> with disklabel) with "boot" type and then installboot -v -b 0 /dev/rwd0e.
> installboot works right without any error (and messages looks ok) but i 
> have "no operating system" when booting.

Because the BIOS will load the first stage boot loader from the bootable DOS
partition. So the start of the partition on which you install it has to match
the start of the NetBSD boot partition.

Maybe we could get installboot guess 'wd0c' from 'wd0e' and write the
first stage boot loader to wd0c instead. I'm not sure if this would still
work with a disk without DOS partiton table.

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
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