Subject: Dicing with disks
To: None <port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: Andy Ball <ball@cyberspace.org>
List: port-i386
Date: 07/30/2001 22:31:19
Hello!

(yes, it's me again ;-)

I've read the man pages for fdisk and disklabel a few times,
but still don't have a very concrete handle on how to go
about preparing a disk for use with NetBSD/i386.  I'm
guessing that I have to fdisk, disklabel and mkfs in that
order, but I'm flailing a bit to establish the right
incantation for each.  The disk is a Conner 170Mb ATA drive.
It has 902 cylinders, 8 heads and 46 sectors per track.  I'd
like to use the whole disk for data (except for its master
boot record, which loads NetBSD off the second disk drive).

I'm beating my head against fdisk at the moment, but think I
have some sort of partition on the disk.  disklabel creates
an 'imaginary' label, but I'm not sure how to write this to
the disk to make it less imaginary.  Any helpful pointers
would be most welcome.

Regards,
  - Andy Ball.