Frederick Bruckman writes:
 > Right. Consider the case where you have several extended partitions, all
 > MSDOS, but no NetBSD partition. The kernel can't tell from the MBR where
 > the extended partition are, and you can't easily tell it, because
 > there's nowhere to write the label. I thought you said you actually did
 > what Todd suggested may be possible -- created a disktab entry, and used
 > that to mount partitions. It would be great if you could.

Ib-Michael Martinsen <imm@nethotel.dk> responds:

> You are probably right. But I don't know the details of the MBR layout
> so I can not really comment on these matters. It just seems to me that
> if it is possible for Windows to figure out which partitions are
> primary and extended then it surely must also be possible for NetBSD?

Further up above, I think it's one extended partition with several logical
drives/partitions, rather than several extended partitions.  Not only Windows,
but Linux too, can figure which partitions are primary and which are logical,
and Linux finds the partitions, which NetBSD seems not to.  But when I booted
the OpenBSD 2.9 or 3.0 installation diskette (there is only one), and ran
"disklabel wd0" (without the quotes), OpenBSD found the DOS primary partition
and DOS and Linux logical partitions.  At that time I had both NetBSD and
OpenBSD-intended primary partitions, but I later combined these two into one
NetBSD primary partition after being repeatedly informed that OpenBSD could not
boot from above 8 GB.  It ought to be possible to find DOS, Windows and Linux
partitions without messing the MBR, and to find DOS, Windows and Linux
partitions on another disk without writing anything to that disk.  Linux can
do that, and apparently so can OpenBSD.